Chinese Urban Shi-nema: Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China [1st ed.] 9783030496746, 9783030496753

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Chinese Urban Shi-nema Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China David H. Fleming · Simon Harrison

Chinese Urban Shi-nema “Fleming and Harrison have produced a deftly-written psychogeography of the contemporary Chinese city. The authors peel back the skin of the city to reveal urbanscapes unfamiliar even to long-term residents of Ningbo, but nonetheless exhilarating. These observations are underpinned by a theory of the screen that is compelling to the reader in its articulation of a concept that here is inter-woven with motifs and ideas that draw on Chinese culture. For all those who seek insights from the collision of screens, global capitalism and contemporary Chinese urban culture, there is no more sure-footed guide than Fleming and Harrison’s impressive book.” —Andrew White, Independent Scholar and author of Digital Media & Society (Palgrave Macmillan 2014)

David H. Fleming • Simon Harrison

Chinese Urban Shi-nema Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China

David H. Fleming University of Stirling Stirling, UK

Simon Harrison City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China

ISBN 978-3-030-49674-6    ISBN 978-3-030-49675-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Mira, the captain of our ship, in memory of our adventures in Ningbo DHF For 陈星超, for making the city in this book a place to call home SH

Preface

Getting Started: And Learning from Our Students With rapid changes in technology Chinese society has transformed radically… (Anonymised UNNC Student Essay 2012, p. 1)

After spending the best part of a decade marking Chinese undergraduate and master’s work at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), we have each encountered many thousands of essays that began with a riff on the line reproduced as our epigraph. Various modulating iterations of which were invariably jerry-rigged to introduce a throng of Arts and Humanities and Social Science arguments on a wide range of subjects spanning: the rapid modernisation of Chinese urban infrastructure, the appearance of luxury shopping malls populated by foreign stores and brands, the spread and acceleration of the internet, smartphone use, social media apps and new-fangled ways of acting, living, viewing and spending. These were what most Chinese students were naturally inclined to write about. And while the vagueness and derivativeness of such opening lines have—on the odd occasion—admittedly frustrated the marker, when we retroactively reflect upon the sheer volume of these mantra-like statements we have parsed, it now speaks to us as a general truism, or generational zeitgeist, indexing a shared impression that no doubt remains very real to a vast number of young people growing up in China today. With hindsight one particular dissertation exploring the “becoming-­ image” of Chinese culture under capitalism stands out as an illustrative case in point, and can help us here to gesture towards the core themes of vii

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the current project. This was a visual anthropology master’s project that was authored by a student that had undertaken an internship in a reassuringly expensive Ningbo “pre-wedding” photo agency—just one manifestation of the multimillion RMB modern wedding industry that produces “fantasy” image-memories for Chinese couples engaged to be married. Turning her free labour into university work had allowed this supervisee to repurpose a vast archive of images that, to our Western eyes, looked more like fashion magazine spreads than traditional wedding snaps. For, in our experience, wedding pictures are often taken on the big day, then hung up or archived in the family home, rather than being taken in advance and then projected onto various screens during one’s wedding. What is more, these image spreads typically captured the same bride adorning three or more different wedding dresses across a shoot, while the groom modelled a corresponding range of complementary styles and colours of suit: a white wedding dress paired with a black tux and dickie bow, for example, or a red Qipao with a traditional Chinese suit. All peppered with an array of hats, shoes, canes, veils and props—sometimes requiring the assistance of various camera men, drone operators, make-up artists and set hands. Depending on the season and budget, we were informed, couples could be bussed with their wardrobe and make-up artists to be imaged next to: a grey horse in the beach surf; a row boat next to a picturesque lake; a field of cherry blossoms; a traditional village or some other dynamic touristic hot spot such as the Shanghai bund or DongQian Lake that provided their picture with a suitably aestheticised backdrop (Fig. 1). More affluent couples, the author informed us, would often go abroad with a crew, with Paris, Sydney and Santorini then being the most popular options for a romantic shoot—a trend that was itself inculcated around 2008 after the widely covered destination wedding of the Chinese movie star Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who helped popularise and engrain a “No travel, no wedding” ethos with regard to at least one of the three new-­ fangled wedding industry phases (pre-wedding, wedding, honeymoon) (see e.g. Zhuang and Everett 2018, p. 84). The final images derived from such events would invariably be edited and colour-corrected, with the company removing haze and blueing the sky, while also performing complementary 2D digital skin grafts and teeth-whitening procedures as needs be. The dissertation argued that within the new geometry of Chinese status, when eventually displayed on the Big Day or hung in the married couple’s (invariably) new home, these commercial images signified that ironclad distinctions between memory and fantasy, reality and fiction,

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Fig. 1  Wedding shoots at DongQian Lake, Ningbo

were eroding in contemporary China. Channelling Baudrillard she concluded: “The Chinese no longer have traditional weddings or identities, but they do produce wonderful hyperreal images.”1 For us, the student’s project also made clear what Susan Sontag means when she argues that social change has been “replaced by a change in images,” and that “the production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology” (2018, p. 178). Looking back on this period, and both detouring2 and distilling thousands of comparable essays and dissertation work, what successive cohorts of young people appeared to be experiencing—and often vicariously too through the eyes of three generations of close-knit family—and documenting was that they were bearing witness to an unprecedented event or historical phase transition that marked nothing short of a complete recoding and reorganisation of China’s socio-political fabric and cultural being. Or again, that everything everywhere—from dating to working, exercising, eating, shitting and personally communicating—was being re-­ imagined, re-invented and overcoded. Which is to say, they were bearing

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witness to an unfolding mutation in the relationship between subjectivity and its conditions of exteriority. Many of these projects were not wrong in pointing to China’s joining of the WTO in 2001 as a key catalyst for these changes, albeit better ones acknowledged the pre-history of this trend through the market-economy reform experiments of Deng Xiaoping or, better still, pointed to a longer history of the Chinese state associating itself with civilising drives and modernising teleologies. However, most young Chinese people saw the nation’s new geopolitical orientation towards the outside developing alongside a concomitant reorganisation of its internal cities and their material infrastructure—as well as the modes of social life unfolding therein (through the use of technologies—including “of the self”—and techne more generally). It is these manifold processes that Chinese Urban Shi-nema takes as its focus. Looking back, perhaps a short blog piece we wrote together entitled “Are the Chinese Losing Their Gestures?” retrospectively appears as a significant prelude or prolegomenon to this book (Fleming and Harrison 2016). This was a project that we originally wrote together as a form of report—in the style of a staged philosophical dialogue—derived from a few conversations we were then having, and which reflexively speaking demonstrates that we were also taking our lived environment not so much as a standing reserve but as a stimulus and provocation for thought. That dialogue developed and helped us to road test and work through a complex of ideas and concepts that stemmed from, and helped to digest, our different but overlapping lived experiences in China. As a monograph project Chinese Urban Shi-nema began when we were both living and working in the place where this book lays its scene, Ningbo, China. However, as we put our finishing touches to the book today, we both find ourselves living elsewhere: in Edinburgh and Hong Kong respectively. It is therefore a book that is shaped by different moments and speeds, and by a heat proximity and immediacy that has since been tempered by distance and reflection. It remains therefore a work about transitions and transformations—“a finding which is also a leaving” (Thrift 2008, p. 16)—that was contingently compounded by our own transformations in circumstances. Stirling, UK Hong Kong, China 

David H. Fleming Simon Harrison

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Note 1. In their Brief history of Chinese Wedding and Bridal Photography Tourism, Zhuang and Everett (2018) situate Chinese “pre-wedding photography” within a booming 500-billion RMB wedding market as “the most essential spending among all of the wedding event purchases” (p. 80). Our description of real estate showrooms in Chap. 3 explore how these trends become mobilised in the sale of real estate, where they become further articulated with what Zhuang and Everett refer to as “the behaviour of ‘travel with a bridal gown (带着婚纱去旅行)’” (idem). 2. Our use of the term “detour” throughout this book derives from the notion of détournement, a critical and dialectical manoeuvre popularised by Guy Debord and the Letterist International, and later the Situationist International. Détournnement is a term often translated as “deflection,” “diversion,” “detour,” “hijack,” “misuse,” or “reroute” in English. In thesis 208 of Society of the Spectacle (1984), Debord argues that détournement must appear “‘in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any inherent or definitive certainty.”’ Elsewhere, in the 1956 essay “‘A Users Guide to Detournement”’ co-authored with Gil J. Wolman, the procedure is described it in terms of a “‘mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, [which supersede] the original elements”’ to produce a “‘synthetic organisation of greater efficacy”’ (1956, p. 15). Our use of the term “detour” throughout aims to evoke this sense of hijacking and deflecting original meaning.

References Fleming, D.  H., & Harrison, S. (2016). Are the Chinese Losing Their Gestures? Published on Contemporary Chinese Studies at UNNC Blog, December 9, 2016. Retrieved from http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chinesestudies/2016/12/09/chinese-losing-gestures/. Sontag, S. (2008). On Photography. London: Penguin Classics. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Routledge. Zhuang, Y.J., & Everett, A. M. (2018). A Brief History of Chinese Wedding and Bridal Photography Tourism‑: Through the Lens of Top Chinese Wedding Photographers. In E. Yang & C. Khoo-Lattimore (Eds.), Asian Cultures and Contemporary Tourism. Perspectives on Asian Tourism (pp.  79–100). Singapore: Springer.

Acknowledgements

Chinese Urban Shi-nema was written between 2016 and 2019, even if its gestation preceded this by quite some time. There are accordingly innumerable people and organisations whose thoughts and actions directly and indirectly impacted this project during different stages of its formation and development, including the people of Ningbo, to whom we also dedicate this work. We would especially like to thank Paul Martin for sharing his material on the Trent Buildings, which has been referenced in our university chapter. We also extend a special thanks to Melissa Shani Brown for her valuable feedback on an earlier version of our manuscript. DHF would also like to express thanks to Marielena Indelicato for inviting him to road test an inchoate version of the museum chapter at the Ningbo Institute of Technology, and David B.  Clarke for his feedback and guidance on an article version of this work. Special praise also to our many many friends and ex-colleagues at University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) who are all part of this book in some way, shape or form. Particular thanks here to the following for their inspiring chat, or for helping us bounce ideas around, and being great sounding boards (in alphabetical order): Stephen Andriano-Moore, Amy Brown, Yu-Hua Chen, Clifton Evers, Maris Farquharson, Fiano Fu, Filippo Gilardi, Amarpreet Gill, Philip Hall, Lili Hernandez, Derek Irwin, Daryl Johnson, Dorran Lamb, Peter Lamb, Bjarke Liboriussen, John Lowe, David O’Brien, Jeanne O’Connell, Du Ping, Phil Ramsey, Richard Silburn, Rob Smith, Marshall Stauffer, Jonathan Tillotson, James Walker, Kim Wilcocks, and Siegfried Yeboah. We also thank the IC heads of school xiii

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(from 2010 to 2017): Paul Gladstone, Stephen Quinn, Adrian Hadland, Fintan Cullen, Adam Knee and Andrew White; and the English heads of school (from 2013 to 2018: Geoff Hall, Matthew Beedham, Margaret Gillon Dowens, and Lixian Jin). DHF would also like to thank the “Film-Philosophers” who have heard and fed back on the Shi-nema work, or whose thoughts and ideas have inspired this project more generally. Special mention on this outing to (in alphabetical order): Lucy Bolton, William Brown, Yun-Hua Chen, David Deamer, Victor Fan, David Leiwei Li, David Martin-Jones, Greg Singh and David Sorfa. We also thank our friends, colleagues and mentors in applied linguistics and gesture studies. Our showroom research was first discussed through the lens of metaphor at panels organised by Thomas Wiben Jensen and Linda Greve, where we received their generous feedback as well as insights from Cornelia Müller and Ray Gibbs. Yu-Hua Chen contributed to the analyses of student talk in our chapter on the transnational university, which also benefitted from discussions on panels organised by Peter De Costa, Curtis Green-Eneix and Wendy Li. SH thanks Chen Xingchao for enabling many privileged experiences of Ningbo and for explaining their cultural significance with local insight, as well as Mark Harrison for cheering on this work from overseas. DHF thanks Mira, whose own work and inexhaustible support made the writing of this book possible. This book is also dedicated to Phaedra and Tarran, our lightning and thunder. Thanks as always to the Fleming and Vakily Clans. Parts of Chap. 3 originally appeared as David H. Fleming and Simon Harrison. (2018). Selling dream (un) real estate with Shi(势)-nema: Manipulation, not persuasion, in China’s contemporary cinematic cities. Social Semiotics, 30(1), 45–64; and in Simon Harrison and David H. Fleming (2019). Metaphoricity in the real estate showroom: Affordance spaces for sensorimotor shopping. Metaphor & Symbol Special Issue: Ecological Cognition and Metaphor, 34(1), 45–60. Some sections of Chap. 4 also appeared in David H.  Fleming. (2017). The Architectural Cinematicity of Wang Shu and the Architectonic Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Diagrammatically decomposing the “main melody” in monu-mental assemblage art. Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 3(1), 33–52. While we have tried to avoid them, all mistakes indubitably remain our own.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Shi-Story and Theory 31 3 Commercial Overground Shi-Nema: Some Notes on Cinematicity and Its Propensity for Selling Dream (Un) Real Estate in Contemporary China 63 4 In-dependent Art Shi-Nema: Decomposing the Main Melody via Monu-mental Time-­Images 99 5 Transnational Sci-Fi Shi-nema: Or, Diary Notes from “Westworld” Regarding Neoliberal Dulosis, “Academic” Automatons and the Franchised Post-historical University in the Era of Global “Excellence”139 6 Shi-Nematic Games (Casino Capitalism)185 7 Epilogue: Disneyfied Dreamwork Shi-nema—Tracing a New “Old” Path Through the Inauthentic “Traditional”219 Index231

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Approach to the salesroom 73 Fig. 3.2 Secluded beach set-up with private BBQ grill manned by carte bleu chef 74 Fig. 3.3 Welcome foyer of salesroom 76 Fig. 3.4 Maquette and wall map perspectives 77 Fig. 3.5 The Southeast Asian decoration at Bali Sunday80 Fig. 3.6 Promotional video sent to social media accounts 81 Fig. 3.7 Salesroom with wedding suite mise-en-scène84 Fig. 3.8 Perspectives on the Price Wall 89 Fig. 4.1 The Ningbo Historic Museum 108 Fig. 4.2 Expressionistic cinematicity 122 Fig. 4.3 Expressionistic horror 123 Fig. 4.4 Rhythmical stone montaging 124 Fig. 4.5 Close-up time images 125 Fig. 4.6 Stratified geological aesthetics 126 Fig. 4.7 Opening image of I Wish I Knew126 Fig. 4.8 The larger lion overpowering a smaller cub 127 Fig. 4.9 Arrangements of mahjong tiles 128 Fig. 5.1 Nottingham building’s Classical Revival style. (Source: https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/hr/jobopportunities/jobs.aspx)144 Fig. 5.2 Scene from Sou suo featuring the UNNC Trent Building 145 Fig. 5.3 “Two Jags” (later “Two Jabs”) Prescott at UNNC 150 Fig. 5.4 University branded materials at UNNC. (Screen capture from online store: https://h5.sosho.cn/shop/offer/list.html?mall_ id=168)152

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 Fig. 6.9 Fig. 6.10 Fig. 6.11 Fig. 7.1

Captured website image: “UNNC recognized as one of Britain’s leading businesses in China” 157 Mobile banner announcing success with the arrival of the Thought Leader 163 Jack Ma, The World Invites You: a student-led amateur short blending corporate and academic worlds 165 A K-pop dance routine incorporates a Starbucks coffee cup 168 Starbucks outlet built into teaching/learning spaces 172 Therapy animals in the petting zoo during RUOK Week (displayed on the Department of Campus Life website) 174 Encounter with the building site 192 Wedding traditions reimagined in the grounds of Bali Sunday197 (a) Golden eggs upon entry, (b) pitchman on stage, (c) salesman dangles red envelope, (d) sizeable crowd gathers, (e) live-streaming images from the promotion booths 199 Logo of Bali Sunday: a multicolour peacock (left) and the NBC logo (right) 205 Logo of Bali Sunday: a multicolour peacock 206 Busy mall in promotional video (top); empty mall in reality (bottom)207 Picket line at main entrance to mall 208 Board game covers the floor of the mall (left), with the wheel of fortune (right) 209 Logic of the board game (left), with novelty gifts including a tropical fish (right) 210 Chinese Valentine’s Day instructions and the wheel of fortune 211 Spinning the wheel (left); onlookers gather, player shushes them (right) 211 The vending machine (future tradition) in the Qiantong enclosure (historically repurposed setting) 225

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Arguments for the political efficacy of film have always held onto the idea that film must move off the screen into the world. —Pratt and San Juan (2014, p. 1) Cities, particularly large cities, were the places where the strangest mixtures of food and genes, money and words, were concocted. —DeLanda (2000, p. 211) The postmodern city amounts to its posthumous continuation, its fractal form. —Clarke (2003, p. 94)

Chinese Urban Shi-nema dives into what has aptly been named the mise-­ en-­scène of Capitalism’s Second Coming to China (Li 2016, p.  5), to explore what becomes of Chinese societies, cities and subjectivities during an unprecedented period of urban and economic generation and transformation. Situating itself in the historical aftermath of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, the book offers a series of grounded case studies from within the processual city of Ningbo (as it transitioned from being a second tier city to a “new first tier city”) that mosaic an archival image of how contemporary urban life in China is undergoing a series of radical changes, transformations and reorganisations—including of “genes, memes, norms and routines” (see e.g. DeLanda 2000, p.  212) as new forms of consumer culture bed in. © The Author(s) 2020 D. H. Fleming, S. Harrison, Chinese Urban Shi-nema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_1

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Harnessing a pars pro toto approach, we explore five very different architectural assemblages, or technostructural arrangements—including luxury real estate showrooms, a Pritzker prize winning history museum, China’s “first and best” Sino-foreign university campus, a series of gamified urban “any-now(here)-spaces” (Fleming 2014) (such as shopping malls and building sites that channel and express the frenzied logic of so-called Casino Capitalism) and a new “Old town”—that together cast light upon the broader picture sweeping up Greater China during the most radical and rapid period of urbanisation and infrastructural transformation the planet has ever witnessed. Our Realist soundings of these different assemblages typically hone in on the psychophysiological experiences of various (domestic and alien) citizens that become transactionally incorporated into these newly emerging forms of affordance space, which we, in a nod to Le Corbusier, frame as contemporary “machines for living” (1986, p. 95) indicative of a postsocialist phase of Chinese modernity. More specifically, the book’s triangulation of philosophical concepts, empirical data and ethnographic observations become mediated through a creative encounter between the Chinese concept of “shi” (势) and the human geographer David B. Clarke’s notion of “cinematicity.” Shi is described by sinologist philosopher François Jullien as the inherent potentiality at work in configuration, or a “potential born of disposition” (1995, p. 27, emphasis in original), while the portmanteau cinematicity blends theories of urbanism, cinema and contemporary capitalism (illuminating both the cinematic qualities of the city and the city on screen) with a sense of cinematic automaticity, suggesting something akin to the automatic thinking of the city by the cinema and vice versa. Paramount to this study is the emergence of new “entrepreneurial cities” in China, which arrive in tandem with a historically new species of consumer citizen: or what David Leiwei Li, after Michel Foucault, re-­ christens homo economicus—that “instrumentalist figure forged in the effervescent conditions of market competition” (Li 2016, p. 58). Keeping one eye on each, or a blend of bodies-cities, we foreground contemporary examples of what we playfully call urban shi-nema (and more on which in Chap. 2) that surface as historically unique sites/sights designed to direct and trigger a range of desired human (trans)actions, thoughts and feelings. Collectively, in the following chapters we thus investigate what we might call the “significant forms” and affective constellations of five different urban configurations, which each expose how China’s external embrace of global capitalism, its internal promotion of consumer culture and its

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attendant mnemonic practices have radically reshaped modern life and subjectivity. These vary from “apparatuses of capture” (to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology; 2004b) to bona fide artworks, whose contrived arrangements (of objects, materials and their attendant qualities) appear designed to move, make act or transform (change the status/ capacities of) the human traffic that pass through them: typically in a profitable way (both to make profit in the case of a showroom in Chap. 3 and the sales rooms of Chap. 6 and to endow the profits of a foreign educational model as per Chap. 5). Or, put differently, the urban spaces we investigate all “intend” something and thus reveal forms of anticipation and affective agency parametrically built into their material structures. Chinese Urban Shi-nema accordingly strives to isolate what we might call five pivotal points of 4E psychogeographic articulation within contemporary Ningbo in a manner designed to be at once productively alienating and defamiliarising for (to momentarily speak like others) its Chinese and Western readers alike. Ruminate here that with regard to our alien and alienating methods we are keenly aware that, for good or for bad, the practice generally known as “psychogeography” has, since the work of Guy Debord (1981, p. 53), aptly been described as the “science fiction of urbanism” (Asger Jorn quoted in Coverley 2010, p. 99). And while some might no doubt parse this phrase in a pejorative fashion, we rather—recalling Gilles Deleuze’s description of a good work of philosophy being part detective novel, part science fiction—take this to be a positive thing, and a necessary step in fashioning new perspectives or ways of thinking and proceeding (see e.g. Deleuze 2004a, p. xix; 2004b, p. 162). In point of fact, we push Debord’s science fiction method for producing fresh alien perspectives even further by putting them into transformative compositions with what has variously been called the new “E-approaches” (the “E” of ecological, meaning embodied, extended, embedded and enactive). From such perspectives each chapter explores how different combinatronics of urban sensation and affect become constellated and arrayed in a manner designed to transactionally guide or manipulate certain outcomes. By such measures Chinese Urban Shi-nema also effectuates a form of provocation, inasmuch as by setting itself the important but always difficult task of merging theoretical discussion with empirical analyses (while blending philosophical thought, empirical data and (auto)ethnographic observations) it strives to push readers to perceive how millennial urban China is increasingly becoming-cinematic, or rather, as we will show in the next chapter, operating upon hyperreal shi-nematic principles.

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Notes Towards a Method In the second half of the twentieth century Deleuze and his erstwhile collaborator Félix Guattari noted that the dominant system of global capitalism had undergone a mutation (see e.g. Deleuze and Guattari 2004a, 2004b; Deleuze 1997; Guattari 2010, 2013). Broadly speaking, since Marx’s writing, capitalism has evolved and shifted away from enclosed industrial structures (and disciplinary systems) geared towards production and services towards new structures concerned with producing “signs, syntax and … subjectivity” (Genosko 2012, p.  151)—a system that Guattari’s friend Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2007, p. 76) later came to call global semiocapitalism, wherein capital-flux increasingly “coagulates in semiotic artefacts without materialising itself” (in Genosko 2012, p. 150) and the “production and exchange of abstract signs has taken the predominant place in the overall process of accumulation” (Berardi 2015, n.p.). These are notions that clearly align and resonate with a longer tradition of cultural criticism (stretching from Herbert Marcuse to Guy Debord through Jean Baudrillard and Jonathan Beller) that foregrounds how capitalism in the West (or the Global North) progressively came to function as “a semiotic operator” that aimed to “[seize] individuals from the inside” with the goal of “control‑ the whole of society” (Guattari in Genosko 2012, p. 149; see also Guattari 2010). With this last point in mind, Berardi has more recently penned a grim account of what he refers to as our “dark zeitgeist,” honing in on the prevailing conditions of what he now calls absolute capitalism (on account of the etymology of “absolute,” meaning emancipation from any limitation) upon the collective well-being and mental health of people around the planet. The paradigmatic political expressions of our global winter of discontent, he argues, have now become mass murder, murder-suicide and self-murder (Berardi 2015).1 “Suicide is a reaction of humans facing the destruction of their cultural references, and the humiliation of their dignity. This is one of the reasons that it so indelibly marks the landscape of our time” (2015, p.  159). And although incidences of suicide do form pertinent vectors within each of our case studies here—with both authors having witnessed the aftermath or been made aware of multiple suicides and suicide attempts within and around the architectural assemblages featuring in Chaps. 3, 5 and 6—for various political, personal and ethical reasons we opt to screen out these considerations on this outing and

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instead make reference to Berardi’s present-day work for an altogether different purpose. Indeed, above and beyond the overwhelmingly dark picture Berardi extracts from contemporary life under absolute capitalist structures, there remains a ray of light that emerges courtesy of his being convinced to travel to the East Asian city of Seoul to deliver a talk on his political project. Of importance to our approaches here, during this trip (to what is ironically the country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world, see e.g. BBC 2019; WHO 2019), Berardi outlines gaining a fresh perspective courtesy of his alienating encounter with the unfamiliar citizenry and urban construction of the Special City. There, he describes: inspecting the faces of young people—their signs and gestures, and their ironic declarations of the T-shirts (“I’m easy but too busy for you”)—I was impressed by the importance of design in Seoul’s contemporary visual environment. The traces of traditional life are hidden, overtaken by the new designs of life. Social communication has been thoroughly redesigned by the cellular smartphone. Vision has been thoroughly redesigned by screens of all sizes. (2015, pp. 191–192)

Lingering on this last point he notes how it suddenly struck him that in fact “Screens are everywhere: big screens on the walls of skyscrapers, medium sized screens in the railway’s stations lobby. But the small private screens of the smartphones demand the undivided devotion of the passing hordes, as they calmly and silently shuffle through the city, heads bowed” (Berardi 2015, p. 192). Such observations, triggered by an acculturated Westerner’s alienating encounter with an unfamiliar East Asian urban ecosystem, also chimes with our experiences of living and working in the city of Ningbo China (albeit for a more extended period, just shy of a decade), wherein the convergence and synergy of screen media and city life forced us to take pause and confront something of what China, and the world of techno-driven-­ semiocapitalism more generally, appears to be in the process of becoming today. Accordingly, over a period that spanned 2010 to 2018 Ningbo became a space that helped each of us grasp and rethink how global capitalism is not so much a system or process that makes us all the same but is rather one that exploits and amplifies difference (in traditions, culture, infrastructure, but also in wealth, social expectations, gender, class and

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status), not least by innervating different fits and bursts of change and growth in diverse geopolitical locales. These differences are key to this book, which we hope might itself serve the reader as a productive form of difference engine. With any luck, for those familiar with Western urban studies, museum studies, education, embodied cognition and so on, our Chinese studies offer alternative alien examples that expose differences that may provoke fresh thought and insight. To Chinese scholars and readers the book might equally provide an enriching alien or barbarian perspective on the nature of the lived ephemeral present. And for those more familiar with a single disciplinary approach, our interdisciplinary melange of different perspectives and aspects may also become constructively alienating and challenging. At least we hope that any defamiliarisation and alienation we throw up might be productive, as it was (reflexively speaking) for us. So, while Berardi might note that there is today in Seoul—as is the case in Ningbo—an explosive proliferation of material screens everywhere, in our mosaic study we also aim to expose how the very principles and affects of cinema and screen media have also become disarticulated from actual screens and have moved into transformative co-composition with the very fabric of China’s contemporary urban psychogeography, realising or actualising something akin to the “universe of technologies of the screen in which there is no longer a distinction between the real and the imaginary” (Baudrillard 2014, p. 180).

Notes on Terminology 1: Films and “The Cinema” While we always take care from chapter to chapter to hang our various shi-­ nematic case studies alongside contemporaneous examples of film (or at least films relevant to them), throughout Chinese Urban Shi-nema we essentially reframe the “cinema” as being far more than just films, describing cinema as something more akin to a mediating substratum of contemporary social reality and ontology. For one thing, the confrontation with millennial postsocialist Chinese cityscapes—with their proliferation of embedded screens of all sizes and their science fictional architecture and light shows—helped us grasp what a thinker like Beller means when, in updating Marx, he notes that the socio-technological processes associated with twentieth-century capitalism had ensured that “all that is solid melts into cinema” (Beller 2006, p. 16). Or, as William Brown more recently puts it, the imaginary of cinema has effectively restructured and

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reproduced the cultural imaginary so that “the cinema” increasingly becomes the “measure of reality as opposed to reality becoming the measure of cinema” (2019, p. 231). All this to say, as aliens living among the Chinese locals, it struck us that contemporary Ningbo (like other parallel Chinese cities we visited) appeared to have stepped right out of the movies, meaning that (to paraphrase Baudrillard this time) in order to best grasp its secrets, we should not simply “begin with the city and move inwards towards the screen” but also consider (Chinese) screens in order to concomitantly move “outwards towards the city” (Baudrillard 2015, p.  56). And in the light of this, Chinese Urban Shi-nema necessarily demanded that we stretch and twist everyday notions of what “cinema” is, or means. Of course, strict definitions of what “the cinema” is (or was, or is not) has necessarily varied depending upon where—in space or time—a given observer was situated, as well as what motivated their analysis and what methods they prioritised when enframing it (technological, economic, psychological, economic, social, political, ideological, philosophical, etc.). For the purposes of Chinese Urban Shi-nema we try to deploy the term in as broad and expansive (non-essentialist) a manner as possible, recognising the cinema as a form of “philosophical perpetuum mobile” (Elsaesser 2008, p.  239, emphasis in original), which always already refers to an ever-­ shifting and evolving confederate of material parts and socio-political-­ economic practices. Looking backwards, for example, we are happy to follow in the footsteps of a philosopher like Jacques Ranciere by viewing “the cinema” as an artistic idea that predated “the cinema as a technical means and distinctive art” (2006, p. 6). Echoes here no doubt of an argument from the Film Theory annals that read Plato’s allegory of the cave as the conceptual invention of the basic cinematic apparatus avant la lettre (à la Jean-Louis Braudy 2004). Sticking with caves, a comparable belief also finds film-philosophical expression in Werner Herzog’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), which implies through its (3D) form and content that a combination of wall paintings and promethean illumination by our ancient ancestors (within the dark caverns of the Chauvet caves) marked the dual emergence of the “modern mind” and proto-cinematic forms of expression—aeons before Plato and the Greeks. For some, such views no doubt simply expand a now century-old discourse that commonly framed the cinema as the ultimate “bastard art”— which is to say, a complete art form that gradually came to re-combine, re-mediate or expressively re-vision the properties, features and capacities

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of older art forms and practices such as painting, literature, music, dance, theatre, sculpture and opera. At their most extreme and bombastic, such attitudes relegated the entire history of art to the status of “a massive footnote to the history of film” (Hollis Frampton in Beckman and Ma 2008, p. 3). More conservative takes, such as those forwarded by the philosopher Alain Badiou, paradigmatically frame the cinema as a “parasitic bastard art” that “amalgamates the other arts without, for all that, actually presenting them” (Ling 2010, p. 35). In Cinema by Other Means (2012) Pavle Levi takes a different dialectical tack on such positions in order to expose the complex affects and effects that the cinema reaped upon surrounding culture, here by specifically zooming in on Yugoslavian arts and avant-garde practices. As the book’s title suggests, this is achieved by foregrounding how other contemporaneous practices (including poetry, art and optical devices) worked to re-materialise and re-mediate the cinema, the absented centre of his study—a method which recasts David B. Clarke’s idea that we now “move through the world left in the wake of cinema” (2007, p. 29). With such views in mind, we are also happy to look sideways and forwards from cinema’s historical emergence as a prime mover and driver of modernity,2 and to entertain the idea that cognate screen forms that were historically derived from the cinema—such as digital cinema and videogames—can also be comfortably housed under a “cinematic” category (without negating their obvious differences and specificities too, and more on which throughout).3 Thus, following a philosopher of film like Berys Gaut, we might trace the roots of kinematics back to “the study of things that move,” meaning that the cinema at its broadest refers to “the medium of moving images” (2010, p. 1). Tying such ideas back to Berardi’s observations above while interweaving thinkers like William Brown, we are also content to see today’s smartphones—with their marketed abilities to record, edit, post-produce, screen, stream, share and consume images—as modern forms of “cinema-machine,” whose affordances and inbuilt mechanisms help amplify processes of control associated with semiocapitalist structures and broader cultural processes of “becoming-cinema” (see e.g. Brown 2019, p. 250; Beller 2006). To similar ends, Badiou helpfully frames the cinema as a bastard mode that has always purloined, borrowed and amalgamated features, parts and processes from distinctly non-cinematic forms and non-art worlds too.4 With regard to blends of artistic and non-art forms that cross-pollinate, and become re-mediated by the cinema today, in Chap. 3 we pick up an

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idea developed by the formalist Soviet filmmaker and film-philosopher Sergei Eisenstein, who maintained that choice examples of pre-cinematic architecture (part art, part craft, part industry) were always already proto-­ cinematic in their form, function and affects/effects—a view that led him to describe the Acropolis of Athens as a veritable “ancient film” (1989, p. 112), whose spectacular ecological form and content helped (aesthetically and epistemologically) nudge Western culture and civilisation towards the invention of the cinema. But if Eisenstein saw architecture helping pave the way towards cinematic cultures, in Chap. 4 we also explore how the architecture that is emerging in a world after cinema, if you will, becomes further modified by its encounters with today’s industrial principles and practices, including digital-cinematic forms and semiocapitalist technologies. With the above perspectives in mind, our notion of “the cinema” might thus be imagined operating somewhat like a “machinic phylum” (Guattari 1984, p.  120)—that is, an abstracted or self-contained unity or virtual phase space, under the threshold of which various actual technological classes and sub-species can be understood emerging and adapting (to specific ecological milieus), if not evolving and differentiating. As our brief engagements with the likes of Debord, Baudrillard and Beller hopefully have begun to make clear, we also take the cinema to be a form of symbiotic fantasy machine that infiltrates brains, bodies, thoughts and desires, getting in between and (re)mediating the border zone between imagination and reality, inside and outside—synaptic notions that we will return to in more detail when we begin our theory building in Chap. 2, after we first turn to and set up our discussion of the unusual method we utilise throughout this book.

Notes Towards a Vertiginous Method So far we have argued that the cinema is a techno-art practice and politico-­ industrial praxis that has driven change and impacted the world around it. Not least because, as Daniel Reynolds puts it in his recent Media in Mind, “minds are ecological phenomena,” and technologies such as cinema essentially help (re)structure the modes of seeing and feeling of those encountering/using them (2019, p.  50). Historical intuitions of such ideas abound, of course, especially after the popularisation and industrialisation of the cinema—as can be evidenced by the work of Walter Benjamin, who noted in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

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Reproduction” that watching film led to “profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus,” which became experienced not only on the individual or subjective scale “by the man in the street” but also “on a historical scale by every present-day citizen” (2007, p. 250). The worlds of critical and philosophical thought have certainly not escaped this ecological cinematisation either. For example, in the realms of Film Theory Braudy (1999) began to perceive the cinema as a metapsychological-­technological reworking of human perceptive and psychological processes, while a philosopher like Martin Heidegger moved in the opposite direction by exposing how the mediatic impact of modern optical technologies led humans to increasingly see “the world as picture” (see e.g. Heidegger 1977, pp. 115–136; Beller 2006, p. 64). To take but one more thinker to whom we will return throughout this book as another illustrative case in point, we might recall how Baudrillard variously described his unique sociological method as constituting a form of “camera movement” or “tracking shot” with regard to the subject-objects of his studies (2015, pp. 12, 13, 35). All of which to say that Chinese Urban Shi-nema might also be taken as a productive exercise in cinematic-driven-­ thinking, which invites its readers to view contemporary Chinese life and lifestyles through and with the lens of cinema, which we frame as a particularly privileged site/sight of concrescence, or growing together, of the modern Chinese city and its citizenry. To such ends we also forward here a detoured notion of cinematicity with unique Chinese characteristics (what we will relate in the next chapter as shi-nematic assemblages) that become palpable within and across different scales of register—ranging from the individual, through various collective groups, up to and including a national community (a statistical population of many millions). And it would be fair to say that at times during the development of this book, the sheer magnitude of trying to bridge—let alone synthesise—these different scalar levels of analysis has on occasion given the authors the odd unsettling feeling of vertigo. But reflecting upon these feelings inevitably brought us by degrees back to the cinema, and specifically what some take to be cinema’s Ur text: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1958)—the form of which can help us to here visualise certain aspects of our own cinematic method before we advance. Indeed, the critical method developed hereafter might be fruitfully thought of as actualising a form of “Vertigo effect”: a visceral visual technique (that in the study of film is sometimes referred to as a “dolly zoom”) made most famous by Alfred Hitchcock, which entails the compositing or

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collapsing together of a rapid pull of focus (typically using wide-angle lenses in camera to adjust the angle of view) and a simultaneous backtracking dolly movement within a single shot. In Chaps. 3 through 6, for example, we expressly fold together a focusing zoom on different urban phenomena (so that we can keep sight of their specific differences and singular details), while concomitantly undertaking a contextualising backtrack that allows us to simultaneously frame their contours and operations in relation to a broader horizon and dynamically changing bigger picture. Closely linked to this dynamic of zooming and backtracking is another useful concept, or image of thought, we borrow from the intersecting worlds of mathematics and philosophy: the fractal. We will go into the specificities of this modelling in more detail in the following chapter but for now wish to note en passant that a fractal is a self-same repeating pattern, or a nested set of sets, whose patternings recur or repeat at different scales of observation or register. The dynamic fractal model we outlay (which should not be taken as being closed, fixed, stable or indeed the only pattern we might perceive) is directly tied to our Realist modelling of social ontology, which, as encountered in the work of materialist thinkers such as Manuel DeLanda, helps us to bridge the “link between the microand the macro-levels of social reality” (including the intermediary of the meso-level; see e.g. DeLanda 2006, pp. 4–5). Drawing heavily on the material philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, DeLanda approaches cities as ecological “assemblages of people, networks, organizations, as well as of a variety of infrastructural components, from buildings and streets to conduits for matter and energy flows” (2006, p. 6) wherein different kinds of catalytic replicators and converters such as “genes, memes, norms, routines” all get mixed up in nonlinear recodings (see DeLanda 2000, p. 212). DeLanda also encourages us to view cities as assemblages of matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, “with each new layer of accumulated ‘stuff’ simply enriching the reservoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatronics available for the generation of novel structures and processes” (2000, p. 21). If the city constitutes one level of study, closely linked to this is the co-built subjectivity of the postsocialist Chinese citizen, which is increasingly the product of urban experience—which is to say, we must recognise a form of entangled or transactional relationship emerging between the city and its subjects, as well as between ourselves and the subject-objects or participants (to speak social-scientifically) who we have been studying.

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Of course, in the language of contemporary physics or continental philosophy we might concede that we are always already materially entangled with our world, or it reciprocally with us. However, unlike other animals, as far as we are aware, the human species frequently fills its lived environments with ever-new forms of tool and machine—what Michel Serres refers to as “Exo-Darwinian” drivers—that help to mould and reshape the individuals and populations who originally moulded them (2018, p.  45ff). Uncomfortable resonances here, then, with Debord’s observation that “[u]rbanism is capitalism’s seizure of the natural and human environment,” which has historically remade “the totality of space into its own setting,” by moulding all of its surroundings, while  developing special techniques for shaping its very territory and arranging “the solid ground” for a very specific “collection of tasks” which developed “logically into absolute domination” (1983, p. 169). A picture that both reflects the flattened totalitarian universe presented in Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1991) and anticipates Baudrillard’s take on later forms of consumer society which began “laying hold of the whole of life,” so that “all activities are sequenced in the same combinatorial mode, where the course of satisfaction is outlined in advance, hour by hour, [and] where the ‘environment’ is total—fully airconditioned, organized, culturalized” (Baudrillard 1998, p. 37). As this book will show, urban China has more and more been conceived of as, and built into, a machinic-space of techno-capitalist transaction: a concept that we use in two distinct but overlapping ways throughout this book. Firstly, while the notion of “transaction” most commonly refers to a commercial system of exchange, typically of goods, services or signs for cash (or increasingly monetised data), we also here deploy the term with a secondary philosophical and critical shade. This evokes a conceptual notion of trans-actions that expose how the borders between inside and outside, subject and object, human and media (and for us researcher and researched) become blurred and smudged. Tied to this, we find it more fitting to say that the commercial worlds we studied appeared to want their human citizen-customers to become incorporated (as well as immersed or entangled) into them. Or, put differently, Ningbo’s embedded modern machines for living intend to incorporate individual and collective desires into their operations, meaning that urban forms and functions increasingly anticipate and co-constitute Sinicised versions of homo economicus (Li 2016, p. 58). Drawing inspiration from the influential assemblage models and methods of Elizabeth Grosz, we approach the corporeal body as a form of

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“socio-cultural artefact” that provides the material conditions for contemporary subjectivity (1999, p.  381). Worth recalling here is that Grosz’s models were originally developed as a critique of causal and representational models of the body/city relationship, which typically granted precedence to one or other of the elements in the duelling pair. Against such, Grosz projected a radical third way that recognises only transitory moments of connection and two-way co-composition: What I am suggesting is a model of the relations between bodies and cities which sees them, not as megalithic total entities, distinct identities, but as assemblages or collections of parts, capable of crossing the thresholds between substances to form linkages, machines, provisional and often temporary sub- or micro-groupings. (1999, p. 385)

A series of different assemblage interfaces in millennial Ningbo become the throbbing and dynamic focal points of this book. Or more precisely, our pars pro toto approach isolates five or so embedded forms of modern urban assemblage emerging from within the entrepreneurial city. Each was chosen because it expresses something important about the contemporary Chinese city more generally, and by extension the phase transition currently impacting urban China and its citizens’ subjectivities. Without providing any spoilers, this is first and foremost related to new forms of consumerism and consumer culture linked with China’s embrace of global capitalism. Thus, while something like Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1999) presented Paris as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” and cities such as Berlin and New York came to embody and express the prevailing economic and politico-aesthetic logic of the twentieth century (see e.g. DeLanda 2000, p. 92; Baudrillard 2010), our book does something similar for China and its twenty-first-century city-building drives: albeit specifically harnessing Ningbo as a grounded case study that helps illuminate how on-going processes of urbanisation see (second and first tier) Chinese cities emerging as the capital case of twenty-first-century cine-city life. Or again, taking China as “where the action is” in terms of the hyperreal city culture, we offer a series of detailed soundings of heterogeneous commercial and consumerist structures that “add themselves to the mix of previously existing ones, interacting with them, but never leaving them behind as a prior stage of development (although, perhaps, creating the conditions for their disappearance)” (DeLanda 2000, p. 271).

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What is more, if in the Western context the coming together of urban spaces and consumer politics resulted in the emergence of “postmodernist” cities during the twentieth century, which Clarke describes as being “less an identifiable city than a group of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei” (2003, p. 94), we report back on similar phenomena currently defining the operations and topology of what we might for reasons of symmetry here call “postsocialist” Chinese cities.5 Inasmuch as the embrace of semiocapitalism and consumer politics has resulted in the emergence of new forms of city in China, which differ greatly from older feudal or Communist models, and expose the Chinese city’s own “posthumous continuation, [in] its fractal form” (Clarke 2003, p. 94, emphasis in original).

On the State of a City What is a city? This is necessarily a complex question to answer in the abstract or concrete specific in such a slim volume. But it is one that we need to address nevertheless. In hazarding a working definition that we might pick up on here, Grosz notes how the city, in its material form, might be taken as a complex dynamic assemblage knitting together power networks, economic flows and particular “forms of management and political organization, interpersonal, familial, and extra-familial social relations, and the aesthetic/economic organization of space and place to create a semi-permanent but everchanging built environment or milieu” (1999, p. 382). With specific regard to the everchanging form cities take within time, DeLanda points to how historians regularly remind us that “urbanization has always been a discontinuous phenomenon,” defined by fits and bursts, where periods of long stagnation are followed by rapid bursts of growth, if not vice versa (2000, p. 29). Cities are also relational entities, of course, that embody complex ever-shifting relations with other cities, trade routes and nations. Which is to say, we are all too aware that we can only ever gather partial and limited vantages, or fleeting glances, of what any given city is. For such reasons, it is perhaps best to approach cities as prime examples of what Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects: dynamic extended arrangements that appear massively distributed in both time and space and whose spatial and temporal forms expose nonlocal effects of action at a distance. Indeed, in a passage worth quoting at length Morton tallies some of the

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pertinent problems facing us when trying to conceptually define what a city (in this case, London) is: A city contains all kinds of paths and streets that one might have no idea of on a day-to-day basis. Yet even more so, you could live in a city such as London for fifty years and never fully grasp it in its scintillating, oppressive, joyful London-ness. The streets and parks of London, the people who live there, the trucks that drive through its streets, constitute London but are not reducible to it. London is not a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Nor is London reducible to those parts. London can’t be “undermined” downward or upward. Likewise London isn’t just an effect of my mind, a human construct—think of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Nor is London something that only exists when I walk through the Victoria Line tunnel to the Tate Gallery at Plimco Underground Station, or when I think about London, or write this sentence about London. London can’t be “overmined” into an aftereffect of some (human) process such as thinking or driving or essay writing. To this extent writing about music really is like dancing about architecture—and a good thing too. Everything is like that. […] The streets beneath streets, the Roman Wall, the boarded-up houses, the unexploded bombs, are records of everything that happened to London. London’s history is its form. Form is memory. (2013, pp. 90–1)

And while the memory-form of the city is important to what follows, pace Félix Guattari we also concede that cities operate through “abstract machines,” which can be thought of here in terms of functions (see e.g. Genosko 2012, p.  152). Our engagement with form and function throughout this book in turn pays heed to the mediated or experiential dimension of cities for their citizen-subjects. Which is to say, we remain aware that we only ever meet the concrete-functional city half-way, through an embodied and/or technologised interface. Here, the concrete and abstract aspects of the city should be taken as key ingredients in the social constitution of the body and mind of the urban subjects: constituting “a complex and interactive network that links together, often in an unintegrated and ad hoc way, a number of disparate social activities, processes, relations, with a number of architectural, geographical, civic, and public relations” (Grosz 1999, p. 382).

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Ningbo-a-Go-Go The actual and virtual object of this book’s study, if you will, are (five or so) processual urban interfaces emerging within contemporary Ningbo, a sub-provincial port city located in Zhejiang Province on China’s eastern coast, previously known as Ningpo in English, and which can be roughly translated as 宁, ning “serene” or “tranquil” and 波, bo “waves” or “waters.” Today Ningbo markets itself as being one of China’s oldest historical cities—dating from around 4800 BCE. Recalling DeLanda’s point that cities experience fits and bursts of growth and stagnation, the first two decades of the new millennium have arguably overseen the most extensive and rapid periods of urban growth and construction Ningbo has experienced in its 6800-odd-year history, bearing witness to new-fangled forms of ideology and politics that literally become concretised through urban infrastructure and modern city planning (for more of infrastructure as ideology see e.g. Thrift 2015). Consequently, the giant Ningbo-Zhoushan port currently constitutes one of the busiest and deepest working seaports in the world. This means that, no matter where in the world you might be reading this book, and irrespective of whether you have ever heard of Ningbo or not, this globalised place is intimately implicated in, and expressly entangled with, the unfolding realities of your local milieu: even if only through geopolitical notions of action at a distance. For, among other things, Ningbo is continually mixed up with the circulation of the 100,000 or so shipping tankers (and the various products and goods freighted within them) that are required to keep the global economy ticking over (see e.g. Thrift 2015). Of significance to the genesis of this book, as part of the then second tier city’s millennial drive towards modernisation, the University of Nottingham was invited to set up an overseas campus there in 2004, making the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) the first Sino-­ foreign university to open its doors for business in postsocialist China (not withstanding a previous wave of Anglo-American missionary universities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prior to the 1949 foundation of the People’s Republic of China; Bolton 2002, pp. 189–190). The authors of this book began working at UNNC in 2010 (a census year that recorded a growing Ningbo population of over seven million) and 2013 respectively, living and working there during an extended period of rapid change and urban development, which as of 2017 saw the entrepreneurial city

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become recognised as one of China’s “new first-tier cities” (see e.g. O’Donnell 2017). As a consequence of UNNC’s arrival, the everchanging screenscapes of Ningbo also, perhaps inevitably, began to serve as a form of standing reserve for ever more anglophone studies and interdisciplinary academic research projects. Over and above our own empirical, (auto)ethnographic and ficto-critical work (together, alone or with other co-authors),6 and the work of other known and unknown (to us) colleagues and scholars who took UNNC as an academic, political, economic, pedagogical or ideological object of study (and to which we will return in Chap. 5), one standout example of critical urban work by Melissa Shani Brown and David O’Brien warrants a brief mention here. This takes Ningbo’s Moon Lake mosque as a singular case study that helps expose broader political drives associated with the “sinicisation” of Islam within China more generally. Although a study of the sinicisation of Islam may on first flush appear to have little in common with the stated mission of Chinese Urban Shinema, Brown and O’Brien’s methods and findings do reveal fertile parallels and resonances with our own project. In the first place, the method of analysing a contemporary Ningbo site/sight to expose broader trends speaks to our own techniques, especially the way they show how a historically significant mosque gradually had its meanings, history and function altered after becoming surrounded by a new assemblage of modern machines and signs (including state-approved propaganda posters, surveillance cameras, national emblems and commercial buildings). In this sense Brown and O’Brien’s work, like ours, appears attuned to the material expressions and transactional tensions emerging between a historically transforming Chinese reality and the new forms of visual culture that overcode it. In anticipation of what is to come, it is also of relevance that Brown and O’Brien note in passing that since they first began visiting the Ningbo mosque in 2013: the majority of the old late Qing and early Republican era buildings surrounding the lake and mosque have been demolished and replaced by newly built constructions in generic “traditional” style. While some of these new constructions reference the previous buildings on the site many more now house Starbucks cafes, fashion boutiques, bars or chain restaurants. Though evoking the Qing Dynasty streets, the “new old” neighbourhood includes underground parking and security cameras. To the south of the mosque a huge 30-storey luxury hotel has been built, towering over the faithful while

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much of the land immediately surrounding the mosque has been cleared for redevelopment. (2019, p. 8)

Brown and O’Brien’s isolation of an architectural space as an ethnographic site capable of being mined for wider (implicit and explicit) meanings and then articulated to broader political and discursive analysis also chimes (albeit on a different scalar level) with our framing of Ningbo as a type of universal Singular. That is, an object of attention that can be taken as a “singular entity which persists as the universal in the multitude of its interpretations” (Žižek 2007, p. xii), while also serving as a singular example of a Chinese city that concomitantly indexes broader trends unfolding in parallel places across the PRC.

Structure of Approach and Synopsis of Chapters As is almost customary for books inspired by, or written in the wake of, A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a), we concede that this book could pretty much be picked up and read in any order that the reader sees fit. Someone with a research interest in Chinese museums might be inclined to go directly to Chap. 4, for instance. Another reader interested in commercial manipulation might go straight to Chap. 3 or 6, while yet another interested in corporate universities or the embedding of transnational higher education in China may want to hop straight into Chap. 5. While admitting this, the book’s engineered structure does nevertheless harbour an element of intent and functionality, with each chapter’s opening, closing, focusings and backtracks forming into a broader pattern, or series of movements, that build momentum and carry forward meanings and understanding from one to the next. Thus, both in anticipation of our forthcoming engagement with the concept of shi—that which breathes life into landscapes and art, but is also read and harnessed by military generals—and in memory of the restless twisting murmurations of birds that so often kept us transfixed outside of our office windows in the UNNC campus, we would like to quote at length an instructive passage by Hans-Georg Gadamer that we feel speaks to the nonlinear potential of this book and of taking our prearranged path through it. Experiencing like breathing is a rhythm of intaking and outgivings. Their succession is punctuated and made a rhythm by the existence of intervals,

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periods in which one phase is ceasing and the other is inchoate and preparing. William James aptly compared the course of a conscious experience to the alternate flights and perchings of a bird. The flights and perchings are intimately connected with one another; they are not so many unrelated lightings succeeded by a number of equally unrelated hoppings. Each resting place in experience is an undergoing in which is absorbed and taken home the consequences of prior doing, and, unless the doing is that of utter caprice or sheer routine, each doing carries in itself meaning that has been extracted and conserved. As with the advance of an army, all gains from what has been already effected are periodically consolidated, and always with a view to what is to be done next. If we move too rapidly, we get away from the base of supplies—of accrued meanings—and the experience is flustered, thin, and confused. If we dawdle too long after having extracted a net value, experience perishes of inanition. (1995, p. 74)

Chapter 2 sets out the methodological mise-en-scène for all our subsequent analyses, providing the historical, theoretical and methodological approaches relevant to our later case studies. It also sketches out how theory and empirical data become articulated and synthesised. Beyond setting context, we also work to define and illustrate a series of four (or so) interrelating concepts important to our later analyses, first outlining what we mean by cinematicity and shi-nema, before setting out our Realist fractal modelling of Chinese life and our 4E Psychogeographic approaches. Our next perching thereafter lands in the world of high-end lifestyle consumerism and apartment building/buying (Chap. 3). We here frame a series of ephemeral architectural assemblages—designed to advertise and sell luxury lifestyle apartments—alongside contemporaneous examples of “aspirational realist” Chinese cinema, the romantic versions of which unabashedly promote consumerist lifestyle to a growing (predominantly) female demographic that represents an increasingly important economic force within contemporary China. However, while saying this, recent studies have also illuminated how there is, by state-sponsored design, a skewed gendered distribution of real estate wealth/ownership within China today that asymmetrically favours (heterosexual) males (with women ostensibly being systematically excluded from the biggest accumulation of real estate wealth in history, courtesy of the state-backed resurgence of patrilineal gender norms; see e.g. Fincher 2014). It is therefore notable that our key participant in this chapter was a local unmarried Ningbonese woman who began visiting showrooms around the city in her pursuit of buying real estate.

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The photos and video clips that our participant naturally collected during her showroom tours (to document her apartment-buying experience) were subsequently shared with us, as were a raft of ephemeral promotional posters, leaflets, flyers and web links that either she had procured from the different sites or had been sent to her social media accounts. To add to this archival data, we also joined our key participant on several visits (and return visits) to the showrooms. The resulting wealth of materials, we hope, allows us to reconstruct “the concreteness and materiality of the situation which is [otherwise] hard to put into words,” while offering a sense of “being there” to the reader “which is not just a report back” (Thrift 2008, p.  16). Indeed, in and across five different examples of showrooms, or modern affective environments (including the showroom where our participant finally committed to the purchase of her boutique apartment), we work to document and expose various tensions and affective forces used to steer the thoughts, feelings, associations and (trans) actions of potential buyers. We ultimately argue that the various architectural forms explored in this chapter (which we call “Commercial Overground Shi-nema”) illuminate how aspirational cinematic imaginaries (messages, products, desires and lifestyle affects) have become disarticulated from the medium of cinema and put to work in different ways within contemporary Ningbo streetscapes: specifically to increase the efficacy of real estate showrooms as part of a wider politico-economic drive associated with stabilising the economy and promoting consumer lifestyles. In Chap. 4 we then foreground some push back against these broader drives, setting out to compare two singular artworks that although emerging from the distinct creative universes of museum architecture and art cinema—Wang Shu’s Ningbo Historic Museum (2008) and Jia Zhangke’s Shanghai World Expo film Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew (2010) respectively—appear to be undergirded by the same “abstract diagram.” For the former is built out of the remaining fragments of an old city that was bulldozed to make way for newer commercial high-rise complexes (such as those being discussed in Chap. 2), while the latter is a state-­ commissioned art film whose mosaic body renews its auteur director’s fascination with the processes of change and destruction associated with China’s modernisation. This chapter, called “In-dependent Art Shi-nema,” also necessarily puts a repurposed notion of assemblage theory into creative dialogue with the Chinese notion of shi, to illuminate how these outstanding farrago projects emit discordant critical signals into China’s processual cityscapes. Drawing on a hybrid model of image regimes from

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Deleuze’s Cinema 1 (2005a) and Cinema 2 (2005b) also allows us to describe how artistic qualities help formally critique the temporal and teleological narratives of progress that the Chinese state commissioners originally charged the artists with celebrating. This chapter accordingly works to show how although Wang and Jia compose with radically different media, the archival form of their rough and broken artworks directly communicate comparable ethico-aesthetic ideas to the viewer, which ultimately interferes with, and deterritorialises, the dominant national zhu xuanlü (main melody or leitmotif )—a dominant political elucidation associated with the state’s embrace of modernisation and leading citizens into a better future (see e.g. Lin 2010, p. 60; Zhang 2007, p. 2; Jaffee 2006, p. 98). Chapter 5 then opts to rest in the campus world of a transnational higher education institute located in Ningbo’s education zone. Specifically, we zoom in on one of the better-known Sino-foreign ventures representative of the latest wave of Western higher educational franchises currently doing business in the PRC—the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, the self-proclaimed “first and best” Sino-alien university. This chapter, entitled “Sci-Fi Shi-nema,” draws on contemporaneous Chinese movies featuring neoliberal subjects and architectural simulacra (such as Zhang Yuan’s Fengkuang yingyu/Crazy English (1999), Jia Zhangke’s Shije/The World (2004) and Chen Kaige’s Sou suo/Lost in the Web (2012)) as well as classic Western science fiction films (including Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel 1956) and Westworld (Michael Crichton 1973)) to best frame the marketing and selling of alien “education experiences” to the local population. Here, if the concrete buildings emerge as branded simulacra of (other always already hyperreal buildings from) a Western elsewhere, we also work to show how the actions and gestures of the student-­centred interactive teaching staff (and the paying customers/students in turn) have likewise become subsumed within, and infected by, a larger network of gestures and (trans)actions associated with life under what we might here call “Capitalist Realism” with Chinese characteristics (see e.g. Fisher 2010). The analyses in this chapter draw on: auto ethnography; the university’s publically available promotional materials (including its own media propaganda); examples of real technology-enhanced and Starbucks-endorsed classroom interaction from a study of the university’s English language samples; informal interviews conducted with various past and present members of the student and staff bodies. Throughout, we also strive to situate our discussions of this material within a broader picture surrounding the desires, drives and realities of universities,

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researchers and students in the context of education ideologies, language policies and global capitalism. To emphasise the interactive, participatory and ecological dimensions of cinematicity, Chap. 6, “Shi-nematic games,” examines different forms of casino-like gamifications of consumption taking place within uniquely Chinese “non-places” (Augé 1995) or “any-now(here)-spaces” (Fleming 2014) emblematic of globalisation in millennial Ningbo. Here, we examine the natural history of a new lifestyle assemblage—a massive complex which integrates apartment buildings, a mall and a boutique hotel—as it evolved from an empty lot-cum-building site to a smooth and sleek aspirational environ where visitors live, shop, purchase and consume against the backdrop of a Southeast Asian tropical island theme. Another corpus of recordings—including participant observation and digital promotional materials—are here used to identify how in the build up to this site’s opening, a series of participatory games indicative of Casino Capitalism were set up in order to transform players into payers, and payers into players (paradoxically in a state space that otherwise outlaws casinos and gambling). The diversity of our ethnographic materials helps evaluate the experience and impact of these shi-nematic games from the different worldviews and roles of the actors in the evolving apartment-mall-hotel network, including property moguls, interior design companies, commercial tenants, migrant workers, customers (accompanied by grandparents and children) and a range of non-human animals that also become part of the material and semiotic assemblage. We here put the processes witnessed in the mall into dialogue with illegal financial investment strategies associated with contemporaneous “Huallywood” film productions (which saw the wilful manipulation of viewing figures and false critical reviews in order to turn cinematic flops into stock market gold). Above and beyond the gamifications of the film industry, this chapter also draws parallels between the dramas that play out in and around such spaces as they develop and the mediated staging of various games, with the latter ranging from morality-­ lesson board games (e.g. Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders) and syndicated game shows (e.g. The Price Is Right, Wheel of Fortune) to the reality TV shows popular in today’s Chinese attention economies (e.g. The Voice of China, If You Are the One). Delving into these overlaps not only allows us to better identify the winners and losers of millennial China’s cinematic cities but also to see how these malls become symptomatic of an

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increasingly normalised landscape that exposes economic disparities, mental health issues, environmental damage and the abuse of other animals. Our short epilogue thereafter attempts to draw together many of the dispersed threads found weaving throughout the book by turning our attention to Ningbo’s new “old district” Nantang: a “visually edible” (Baudrillard 2005, p. 64) or selfie-friendly “old street” space full of modern restaurants and bars nested inside repurposed simulacral façades of older Chinese buildings. This “Disneyfied” space, which was finished in 2017 near to Ningbo’s new bullet train station, is designed as a key site/ sight of Ningbonese cinematicity, and another entrepreneurial city-space associated with a broader cultural process of becoming-cinema. We here read this hyperreal consumer district alongside modern transnational examples of Disney and DreamWorks cinema that use a Chinese “recipe” to market their wares. Before getting there, however, we invite our readers to now hop through these other Ningbo sites/sights, where they can perch momentarily to explore. For as per Gadamer, meanings therein await to be extracted and consequences to be absorbed, conserved and carried forwards or backwards. The next chapter contains the historical and theoretical fodder for this course of conscious experience.

Notes 1. He there examines the suicides of Wall Street bankers in the wake of the global financial crisis, Chinese factory workers toiling for Apple and Foxconn, Indian farmers trapped and enslaved by multinational GM corporations such as Monsanto and French workers driven to despair under Orange’s unethical managerialism. 2. For Susan Sontag it was photography more precisely which was the technology responsible for making cultures modern, driving individuals and institutions towards the practice of image making and exchanging: As she notes, “A society has become ‘modern’ when one of its chief activities is producing and consuming images, when images that have extraordinary powers to determine our demands upon reality and themselves coveted substitutes for first hand experience become indispensible to the health of the economy, the stability of the polity, and the pursuit of private happiness” (2008, p. 153). In acknowledging this, we at the same time recognise that, pace Karen Beckman and Jean Ma (2008), the still image persisted as the substratum and “optical unconscious” of cinema during the celluloid era; however, we also argue later that this became reconfigured and replaced in the digital

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era with the selfie, arguably the paradigmatic image of our time revealing a more cinema modality or ontology (see e.g. Brown 2019). 3. There is certainly much evidence of increasing eddies and feedback loops emerging between different transmedial forms or platforms today. As Sou suo/Caught in the Web (Chen Kaige 2012), which we engage with in Chap. 5 makes clear, smartphone screens and social media applets increasingly overlay, become embedded in or begin to reconfigure the optics of more traditional screen forms (here narrative film, but also television shows and videogames), while smartphones themselves concomitantly become the hardware device through which most modern Chinese viewers stream and view their movies. 4. Especially when it comes to cutting-edge technological, industrial and scientific tools and hardware. We can think here of contributions from photochemical processes, lens technologies, electrical circuits, industrial practices, digital computing, motion capture, drones and so on. Going further still, while theorists such as Braudy famously took the cinema to be a technological metapsychological modelling or hardware actualisation of human wetware or (brain and body) perception and thought (1999), other thinkers and philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Ronald Bogue and Patricia Pisters have expanded such views by framing the universe itself as a form of “metacinema” (for a survey of such positions see Pisters 2003, p. 4 ff). 5. The term or concept postsocialism has gained a lot of currency in the new millennium. In discussions of Chinese cinemas Zhang Yingjin maintains that the term is best taken as a Chinese equivalent to Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of “postmodernism,” which is expanded to account for a diverse post-Maoist sociopolitical and artistic landscape that includes a broad range of filmmakers from “different generations, aesthetic aspirations, and ideological persuasions [that] struggle to readjust or redefine their different strategic positions in different social, political, and economic situations” (2007, pp.  50–2). Chris Berry on the other hand notes how postsocialism, like postmodernism, should be read in terms of the stubborn persistence of grand myths and narratives long after any real faith in them has been lost (2007, p. 116). 6. In the collaborative process of marshalling and discussing the material for this book, as well as then drafting the different chapters (and responding to comments from peers and reviewers), we have found ourselves at times adopting what we call dual-authored “ficto-critical” strategies. We detour this term from what is often described as an indeterminate set of loosely connected creative and experimental practices emerging out of the new humanities known as “fictocriticism.” The idea of precisely defining what fictocriticism is often troubles writers associated with these transgressive and

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defamiliarising practices (see e.g. Brewster 1996; Schlunke and Brewster 2006; Hass 2017). However, to aid readers here, we might note how fictocriticism is often associated with genre-bending, genre-blending, “genre-­ defying” or “non-genre” (see e.g. Hass, p. 101) forms of writing, which can get mapped alongside other loosely defined practices including creative criticism, gonzo-anthropology, para-fiction or ethnographic fiction. These commonly strive to engage with the wrinkle that emerges between the so-called disinterested academic scholar and the invested and entangled participant (see e.g. Brewster 1996, p. 29; this wrinkle also is embraced in some psychological research, e.g., Busch-Jensen and Schraube, 2019, p.  226). Fictocriticism is thus associated with a situated and reflexive style of writing, or a contextualised first-person experience that embraces performative experimental methods in-formed by critical thoughts and concepts. Often ficto-criticism is adopted or triggered by an attempt to articulate otherwise untellable stories (Brewster 1996, p.  32). Resonating with our multi-­ perspectival approaches here, Katrin Schlunke and Anne Brewster note how fictocritical strategies typically assume “the inventiveness of argument and the creativity of truths,” with a key intention “of this kind of writing and performance [being the] effort to convene new kinds of audiences” (2006, p.  393). These experimental and performative practices often attempt to express thinking through the style and practice of writing and can be linked to attempts to open up new spaces for possibility and thought. As with our ficto-critical work here, the method allows for creative re-orderings and blendings that help us to convey ideas and observations in the sometimes entertaining, amusing or shocking way they were experienced by us (p. 394). In terms of practicalities or to offer concrete examples of this process, such re-orderings and blendings could be seen to be occurring during our interchange of drafts, as one author began to layer the other author’s text with additional details and alternative perspectives based on perceived overlap and fruitful connection with his own material and experience. What we referred to at the time as “layering” or “the appearance of a third author” is what we now recognise as such dual-authored “ficto-critical” strategies.

References Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). London: Verso. Baudrillard, J. (1998). The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage. Baudrillard, J. (2005). The System of Objects (J. Benedict, Trans.). London: Verso. Baudrillard, J. (2010). From Hyperreality to Disappearance: Uncollected Interviews. Edited by Smith, R. G. and Clarke, D. B. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Baudrillard, J. (2014). The Matrix Decoded. In R.  G. Smith & D.  B. Clarke (Eds.), Jean Baudrillard: From Hyperreality to Disappearance: Uncollected Interviews (pp. 179–181). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Baudrillard, J. (2015). America. London: Verso. BBC. (2019, November 24). K-Pop Artist Goo Hara Found Dead at Home Aged 28. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-50535937. Beckman, K., & Ma, J. (Eds.). (2008). Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Beller, J. (2006). The Cinematic Mode of Production. Lebanon: University Press of New England. Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project (H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (2007). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (H. Zohn, Trans. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217–253). New York: Schocken Books. Berardi, F.  B. (2007). The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Berardi, F. B. (2015). Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso. Berry, C. (2007). Getting real: Chinese documentary, Chinese postsocialism. In Z.  Zhang (Ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (pp. 115–134). Durham: Duke University Press. Bolton, K. (2002). Chinese Englishes: from Canton Jargon to Global English. World Englishes, 21, 181–199. Braudy, J.-L. (2004). The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema. In L. Braudy & M. Cohen (Eds.), Film Theory and Criticism (pp. 206–223). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brewster, A. (1996). Fictocriticism: Undisciplined Writing. Writing-Teaching, Teaching-Writing. The Association of University Writing Programs: First Annual Conference, 29–32. Brown, W. (2019). Self–Administering the Image Virus: Six Months of Selfies. In M.  Tinel-Temple, L.  Busetta, & M.  Monteiro (Eds.), From Self-Portrait to Selfie (pp. 231–253). London: Peter Lang. Brown, M. S., & O’Brien, D. (2019). Defining the Right Path: Aligning Islam with Chinese Socialist Core Values at Ningbo’s Moon Lake Mosque. Asian Ethnicity. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2019.1636637. Busch-Jensen, P., & Schraube, E. (2019). Zooming in Zooming Out: Analytical Strategies of Situated Generalization in Psychological Research. In C. Højholt & E.  Schraube (Eds.), Subjectivity and Knowledge: Generalization in the Psychological Study of Everyday Life (pp. 221–241). Springer. Clarke, D.  B. (2003). The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City. London: Routledge.

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Clarke, D. B. (2007). The City of the Future Revisited or, the Lost World of Patrick Keiller. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(1), 29–45. Coverley, M. (2010). Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials. Debord, G. (1981). Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. In K. Knabb (Ed.), Situationist International Anthology (pp. 8–12). Berkley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets. Debord, G. (1983). Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red. DeLanda, M. (2000). A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Swerve. DeLanda, M. (2006). New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (1997). Postscript to Societies of Control. In Negotiations: 1972–1990. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2004a). Difference and Repetition (P.  Patton, Trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2004b). Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (M. Taormina, Trans. & D. Lapoujade, Ed.). USA: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. (2005a). Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (H.  Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2005b). Cinema 2: The Time-Image (H.  Tomlinson & R.  Galeta, Trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004a). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004b). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem & H. R. Lane, Trans.). London: Continuum. Eisenstein, S.  M. (1989). Montage and Architecture (CA 1938). Assemblage, 10(December), 111–131. Elsaesser, T. (2008). Afterword: Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies, Ontologies. In B.  Bennett, M.  Furstenau, & A.  Mackenzie (Eds.), Cinema and Technology. Cultures, Theories, Practices (pp.  226–240). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fincher, L. H. (2014). Left Over Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. London: Zed Books. Fisher, M. (2010). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Unlisted: O Books. Fleming, D. H. (2014). Deleuze, the ‘(Si)neo-realist’ Break, and the Emergence of Chinese Any-Now(here)-Spaces. Deleuze Studies, 8(4), 509–541. Gadamer, H. (1995). In A.  Neill & A.  Ridley (Eds.), The Play of Art in The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient And Modern. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gaut, B. (2010). A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Genosko, G. (2012). Félix Guattari in the Age of Semiocapitalism. Deleuze Studies, 6(2), 149–169. Grosz, E. (1999). Bodies-Cities. In J.  Prince & M.  Shildrick (Eds.), Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader (pp. 381–387). New York: Routledge.

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Guattari, F. (1984). The Plane of Consistency in Molecular Revolution. New York: Penguin, pp. Guattari, F. (2010). The Three Ecologies [Trans Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton]. London: Continuum. Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic Cartographies (A.  Goffey, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury. Hass, G. (2017). Ficto/critical Strategies: Subverting Textual Practices of Meaning, Other, and Self-Formation. Beilefeld: Transcript Verlag. Heidegger, M. (1977). The Age of the World Picture. In W. Lovitt (Trans.), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (pp.  115–136). New  York: Harper & Row. Jaffee, V. (2006). ‘Every Man a Star’: The Ambivalent Cult of Amateur Art in New Chinese Documentaries. In P. Pickowicz & Y. Zhang (Eds.), From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (pp. 77–108). New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. Jullien, F. (1995). The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China. New York: Zone Books. Le Corbusier. (1986). Towards a New Architecture (F. Etchells, Trans.). New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Levi, P. (2012). Cinema by Other Means. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Li, D. L. (2016). Economy, Emotion and Ethics in Chinese Cinema: Globalization on Speed. London and New York: Routledge. Lin, X. (2010). Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-Garde Art and Independent Cinema. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Ling, A. (2010). Badiou and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marcuse, H. (1991). One-Dimensional Man. London: Routledge. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. O’Donnell, B. (2017, June 15). Here Are China’s 15 ‘New First Tier Cities’. That’s China. Retrieved from http://www.thatsmags.com/china/ post/18952/here-are-china-s-15-new-tier-1-cities. Pisters, P. (2003). The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Studies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pratt, G., & San Juan, R. M. (2014). Film and Urban Space: Critical Possibilities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ranciere, J. (2006). Film Fables. Oxford: Berg. Reynolds, D. (2019). Media in Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schlunke, K., & Brewster, A. (2006). We Four: Fictocriticism Again. Continuum, 19(3), 393–395. Serres, M. (2018). The Incandescent. London: Bloomsbury. Sontag, S. (2008). On Photography. London: Penguin.

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Thrift, N. (2008). Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. Thrift, N. (2015, February 26). Cities in the Anthropocene. Paper Delivered at University of California, Irvine. WHO. (2019). Suicide Data. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/mental_ health/prevention/suicide/countrydata/en/. Zhang, Z. (2007). Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of ‘Transformation’ (Zhuanxing). In Z.  Zhang (Ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First century (pp. 1–46). Durham: Duke University Press. Žižek, S. (2007). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge.

Filmography Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Directed by Werner Herzog. 2010. Fengkuang yingyu/Crazy English. Directed by Yuan Zhang. 1999. Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew. Directed by Jia Zhangke. 2010. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Directed by Don Siegel. 1956. Shije/The World. Directed by Jia Zhangke. 2004. Sou suo/Caught in the Web. Directed by Kaige Chen. 2012. Vertigo. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 1958. Westworld. Directed by Michael Crichton. 1973.

CHAPTER 2

Shi-Story and Theory

…it is only through shi that one can get a grip on the process of reality. —François Jullien (1995, p. 31) [T]he experience of film becomes deeply enmeshed in the metropolitan experience as a whole. —Zhang Zhen (2005, p. xxx) Stupid and unreal film fantasies are the daydreams of society… —Siegfried Kracauer (1995, p. 292)

This chapter tasks itself with introducing and setting out four overlapping concepts that impact, or intraface with, the case studies that follow. These include what we mean by cinematicity, which we begin to expand on below as we move towards a related discussion of what we mean by Chinese urban shi-nema. We thereafter attempt to set out our fractalised Realist approach to different scales of analysis, wherein individuals, cities and nation states appear embedded or set within each other. Finally, somewhat aligned with these, we shall speak to our transactional 4E psychogeographical approaches to the individual-milieu-continuum, explaining how this informs our various ethnographic (and ficto-critical autoethnographic) studies. Along the way we will also work to set out the historical context of our study and explore certain tensions emerging between statistical and subjective, macro and micro levels of analysis, which raise questions about © The Author(s) 2020 D. H. Fleming, S. Harrison, Chinese Urban Shi-nema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_2

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individual freedom and subject group orientation. Such discussions are primarily used to help us map out the coextensive nature of cinema and capitalism within China today while ironing out the wrinkles between theoretical and empirical approaches to our subject. In striving towards such goals, we first begin by montaging together a series of historical discussions that can help set us up and on our way.

1935: From Zunyi to New York, Paris and Beijing … via Hollywood and the Screen Body In 1935, while resting in the city of Zunyi (遵义) during the Long March, Mao Zedong was elected chairman of the Communist Politburo, which made him the de facto leader of the Red Army. In that same year, while recovering from an illness in a New York hospital, the sociologist Marcel Mauss became distracted by his female nurses, and in particular the spooky familiarity of their movements and gestures. He recounts wracking his memory to recall where he had previously “seen girls walking as my nurses walked.” And thereafter records: “I had the time to think about it. At last I realized that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema” (Mauss 1973, p. 72). Similar ideas find support in Dana B.  Polan’s assertion that folks increasingly learned “to kiss, to talk, to live, according to the shadows [of cinema]” and that screen worshippers increasingly came to take “the flickers on the screen” as the standard of their own reality (Polan in Beller 2006, p. 3). Or, put differently, in the cinematic age film stars began to impart and spread viral mimetisms, through which they began to “guide our manners, gestures, poses, attitudes, […] the way we light a cigarette, exhale the smoke, the way we lift a glass […] the way we wave or tip our hat” and so on (Morin 2010, p. 136). While such scenarios might from today’s perspective recall something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel 1956)—a science fiction narrative that touts on propagandistic fears of US citizens becoming mindless Communist zombies—it is worth recalling that under the chairmanship of Mao, Hollywood cinema was banned from communist China in an attempt to prevent capitalist ideologies and practices from contaminating Chinese minds. Of course, Mao inherited such views from Leftist thinkers and KNT (Kuomintang or Chinese) nationalists, who had historically

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traded in similar fears—by framing Hollywood cinema as a corrosive mode, or a noxious form of “spiritual pollution,” tantamount to the latest “opium for the masses” (see e.g. Ying Hong in Su 2011, p. 191) pushed on the Chinese by alien capitalists.1

Regarding the Cinematisation of Cities and Life If we were to try to distil the ever-expanding corpus of interdisciplinary work that gravitates around the liminal space situated in between the cinema and the city, the city and the cinema, we might assert that: The cinema and the city coil into a Möbius strip. Consider in such light Paul Virilio’s argument that after the invention of the cinema the “screen abruptly became the city square” (Virilio 2002, p. 447). This idea intensified after the coming of the talkies, as can be evidenced by the now famous critique of the culture industry by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who grumbled that the filmgoer increasingly perceives the street outside the cinema as a continuation of the film they have just left: “Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, p.  126)—a view that in turn anticipates Susan Sontag’s and Jean Baudrillard’s arguments that modern peoples increasingly came to inhabit a simulated or hyperreal world wherein meaningful distinctions between true and false are increasingly difficult to discern (see Sontag 2008, pp. 154–163; Baudrillard 2014, p. 162). Sontag famously essayed that a society might be considered modern when “one of its chief activities is producing and consuming images”: meaning that images increasingly became essential to the health of modern economies, “the stability of the polity, and the pursuit of private happiness” (2008, p. 153). Of significance to what follows, she also observed how within such visual cultures modern subjects would concurrently “feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs” (p. 161). This idea was taken in a different direction by radical thinkers such as Vilém Flusser, who similarly noted that—well before the emergence of Facebook, Instagram or the selfie—everyone now leads their lives “as though under a magic spell for the benefit of cameras” (1983, p. 48). Writing in the aftermath of Michelangelo Antonioni’s (in)famous Chinese documentary Chung Kuo, Cina (1972), Sontag noted how the Chinese appeared to have adopted a different ritualistic and ideological approach to photography, with their images and visual culture divulging a different temperament and ethico-aesthetic: one that always already

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presupposed an idealised framing (read cliché) of the given subject/object and incorporated the corresponding ideal (read moral) viewing position/ perspective (2008, p. 175). Irrespective of acculturated norms and political ideologies, though, Sontag saw that the same corrosive truth undergirded all modern visual cultures: “To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to re-experience the unreality and remoteness of the real” (2008, p. 164). Writing about the US some years later, Baudrillard recasts such ideas to put them into dialogue with moving images rather than stills photography, noting “that life in America can be considered as a film, a movie, and you cannot distinguish between a movie and America. You cannot experience things beyond this hyperreality of films, signs and so on to get to its core, its reality” (2014, p.  162). This echoes Gilles Deleuze’s claim that the world increasingly came to look to us like a (bad) film (2005, p. 166), or William Brown’s more recent assertion that the cinema is now “the measure of reality as opposed to reality being the measure of cinema” (2019, p. 231). By such measure, the real ascendence of cinema (or the ascendence of cinema to the status of the real) in modern cultures might also be approached through Siegfried Zielinski’s notion of the medial “vanishing point” (1999, p. 11ff): a concept built into technologically inscribed ways of seeing, but also creatively associated with the dramatic emergence, and apparent disappearance, of a popular form, as when the cinema suddenly burst onto the scene only to undergo a series of deaths and disappearances. Or, as Evan Calder Williams more recently explicates: the vanishing point signals a process where the energies and techniques of putatively different media become both ubiquitous and entangled, shaping how we see and take on all the tensions, forces and flows that come with them. […] in other words, this vanishing point marks the way that something becomes unseen not because it has been replaced or faded in importance, but because it has become naturalised, a structure and a given, as we forget how it was to have been otherwise. (2017, p. 17)

Vanishing is here correlated with ubiquity, normalisation and the passage of a technological means of perception into the realms of psychological blindness. Alongside Zielinski, arguably the most sustained arguments concerning the cinema’s restructuring of modern societies and subjectivity belong to Jonathan Crary and Jonathan Beller, who chart the historical remaking and reordering of human perception and consciousness together

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with, what Beller calls, the “cinematicity of capital” (2006, pp. 12–28). In The Cinematic Mode of Production, for instance, Beller maps a broader process of becoming-image—associated with the evolution of capitalism— that began inculcating the “cinematization of social relations” and “the cinematization of the subject” throughout the course of the twentieth century (2006, pp. 14, 26). There, the “cinema and its succeeding, if still simultaneous, formations, particularly television, video, computers and internet, [have become the] deterritorialized factories in which spectators work,” meaning that the cinematic image “and its legacy, that gossamer imaginary arising out of a matrix of socio-psychomaterial relations, [is where we] make our lives” (2006, p. 60). Such ideas enjoy a different vector of approach in Crary’s (2001) investigations into the birth of today’s digitally mediated “attention economies,” through which the act of looking (and the co-extensive desire to be seen) have become a form of compulsory labour—a despotic capitalist system wherein the image “pervades all appearing,” to the extent that subjects must “maintain themselves as image,” and labour in the image, which becomes “the mise-en-scène of the new work” (2001, p. 60). All of which to say, since the nineteenth century the cinema and its twenty-first-century cognate forms that egress from its vanishing point have increasingly offered “the emerging paradigm for the total reorganisation of society and (therefore) the subject” under capitalism (Beller 2006, p.  13). In today’s rapidly changing Chinese context these changes are debatably more discernable than they are in many other countries, with sweeping social and economic transformations emerging in tandem with “new representational practices, and with a sweeping reorganization of visual/auditory culture” (Crary 2001, p. 2). For such reasons we hereafter expand Beller’s, Crary’s and Zielinski’s historical arguments to demonstrate the extent to which “capital as an evolving system of organisation, production, and exploitation” has also now become cinematic in the contemporary Chinese context (Beller 2006, p. 22, emphasis ours). Associated with such, Chinese Urban Shi-nema labours to reveal how, in Chinese consumer cultures where capitalist optics and visuality (including as transparency) now reigns, “social theory needs to become film theory” (albeit with distinctive Chinese characteristics) (p. 22). Of course, articulating such debates to the Chinese context has already become a latent theme undergirding much contemporary and historical Chinese cinema-city scholarship. Consider in this light the very ending of Victor Fan’s Cinema Approaching Reality, where—after literally and

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metaphorically “shanghaiing” classical “Western” film theory by passing it through the defamiliarising prisms of Chinese and Buddhist philosophies—Fan unbuttons Andre Bazin’s famous ontological question regarding “What is Cinema?” (1967) in order to repose it as an enigmatic Zen-like riddle concerning “What is not cinema?” (Fan 2015, p. 222; see also Fleming 2017, p. 150). To similar ends, our consideration of Chinese urban landscapes gesture towards the very heart of this problem, for if we are to follow Fan in his claims that Chinese theorists understood cinema as a medium and practice that is forever “approaching the real,” we here foreground how the opposite appears ever more true today, in that the new urban realities of China increasingly betray a complementary movement towards becoming-cinema(tic).

Towards a Theory of Chinese Cinematicity With the above debates in mind, we can now begin building upon a broad but thin stratum of cinema-city works that explore notions of cinematicity (see inter alia Clarke and Doel 2016; Geiger and Littau 2013; Williams 2013, 2016). Nevertheless, while the majority of works penned in this grain tend to use films as their starting point for considering the cinema’s “automatic thinking of the city” (see e.g. Clarke and Doel 2016, p. 3), in a gesture in keeping with our positing here of a concomitant becoming-­ image of capitalist reality, Chinese Urban Shi-nema works to track down and isolate examples of the modern city’s own affective film thinking (to purloin Daniel Frampton’s terminology). To take a point advanced by Geraldine Pratt and Rose Marie San as our departure point, then, we contend that if film indeed operated as a historical “archive of urban space” (2014, p. 11), it is now an undeniable truism that China’s urban spaces ever more reveal their own concomitant archiving (and reterritorialisation) of cinematic tropes, signs, gestures and affects. Indeed, as intimated in our introduction, the contemporary mega cinematic-­cities of Greater China make for a particularly tantalising scene or setting to explore backdrafted notions of urban cinematicity. For, among other things, a near mythical cinematic-hyperreality is made palpable by the newly erected multimodal ensembles of glass and light; the aestheticised landscaped parks whose choreographed jets of water dance to music pumped out from speakers hidden inside fibreglass rocks; the simulacral streets and buildings that establish the consumable backdrops for new forms of cinematic-citizen (avid image makers and voracious image

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consumer). Accordingly, if the dominant framing of cinematicity debates demonstrates how the “criticality of film is thought and made to work through urban space” (Pratt and San Juan 2014, p.  7), we more often than not try to expose the complementary reverse shot (as such), wherein we discover urban settings and spaces becoming intentionally configured in order to affectively direct human actors to perform and (re)act within, and because of, contrived affective film-like set-ups. Yomi Braester (2010) certainly makes a comparable claim within his book-length study into the convergences of cinema and urbanity since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. However, the most radical historical changes affecting the urban environment, Braester argues, were the consequence of abandoning the planned models of a Maoist economy in favour of capitalist globalisation and the concomitant revolution in Chinese culture’s existing visual and optical regimes. Specifically, the latter half of Braester’s book mounts an exploration into the novel urban realities that began emerging within China around the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which became articulated to, and symptomatic of, the most rapid period of urban growth and development the planet has ever witnessed. The key here is how Chinese cinema began influencing and in-forming the texture and shape of the lived spaces, psychic reality and urban psychogeography of China’s (first tier) megalopolises: by introducing impressive images of elsewhere that directly impacted the look of the newly emerging glass and light architectural structures and, as David Leiwei Li (2016) elsewhere argues, by increasingly proffering pedagogical narratives that helped contour the new neoliberal subjectivities (and circulate appropriate desires) needed to populate and operate these new-fangled capitalist machines. Significantly, Chinese cinema “in direct interaction with political decisions and architectural blueprints” began to “forge an urban contract and create the material city and its ideological constructs” (Braester 2010, p. 13). Of course, after 2008 China looked to be on the brink of an economic catastrophe and had to weather a serious crisis in capitalism (if not the nature of capitalism as crisis). Importantly for us here, though, the building of new cities and urban infrastructure played a foundational role in stabilising the local—and by extension global—economy. To encourage the purchasing of real estate, then, the Chinese central bank “decided to adjust the lower bound of the personal loan interest rate to 0.7 times the benchmark interest rate and revert the down payment portion back to 20%” (Gabrieli et al. 2018). This meant, as David Harvey’s (2016) analysis of this situation shows, that the Chinese Communist Party essentially

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began supporting an unprecedented system of debt financing, which allowed for increased urban development, the mass employment of labourers and the pouring of nearly 6651 million tonnes of concrete to help prevent China from economically sinking. Connected to this, new forms of aspirational Chinese cinema (which we will explore in more detail in the next chapter) began to emerge, often peddling a new glamorous form of “Chinese Dream” associated with previously unimaginable consumer lifestyles, which included new homes, cars and commodities. We might consider in this light Li’s argument that a “[n]eoliberal logic is incomplete without its corresponding aesthetics,” which he links to both the radical transformations in Chinese urban space and the domestic cinematic fare projected therein, with each increasingly being arrayed in order to promote “a kindred form of perceiving the world and a structure of consumptive pleasure befitting an economy of the spectacle” (Li 2016, p. 169).2 Or, as Harvey puts in with regard to the new Chinese context, capitalist forms were now literally being built and projected into/onto the Chinese landscape, essentially transforming the natural and human environment into “a series of mnemonics” associated with new consumer identities and collective social meanings (2016, pp. 6–7). Recognising Ningbo’s urban environments as being comprised of pre-­ personal architectural machines whose co-composing forms and functions promote and intend certain tasks and actions important for living and acting in a consumer society means that, like the cinema, these might be fruitfully interrogated as media. What is more, by approaching them as media, we must also recall how they too are patently “in the middle of and shaped by distinctive histories of colonialism, imperialism and globalisation” (Pratt and San Juan 2014, p. 6), as well as, we might add, developments in technics and technologism, which help further highlight how urban spectacles and screenscapes operate as strategic in-between spaces for the regulated (and unregulated) flows and control of desire and capital (see e.g. Mumford 1970, 1971). Arriving here, we should now move to consider our shanghaied concept of Shi-nema.

From Cinema to Shi-nema via Assemblage Theory Today in Ningbo, the dreams and dramas of real life can increasingly be found playing out within a contrived mise-en-scène of screen-based attention economies and commercial cinematicity, certain forms of which, as we will shortly see, (parametrically) conspire to create pressurised

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action-­driven narrative structures—replete with suspense, crisis moments and conflicts (or “duels”)—which appear engineered to inspire probable (re)actions and profitable transactions. In beginning to unpack how these event-acts come to pass and operate, we might first pause to consider the cinematic notion of mise-en-scène, a term originally borrowed from the world of theatre. As undergraduates are taught, when applied to the critical study of film, mise-en-scène can be translated as “staging an action” or “placing on stage.” Of importance here, mise-en-scène is primarily linked to the deliberate arrangement of figures, props, costumes, lighting, colour and scenery in order to optimally communicate meaning and can thus be studied to expose how meaning gets into images. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson accordingly describe mise-en-scène as cuing our expectations, or being deployed to “guide our attention, our understanding, and our inferences about what we see” (1990, pp. 146–147). Which is to say, the strategic arrangement of heterogeneous elements and qualities within a frame are felt to harbour aesthetic-psychic agency in that they collectively provoke movements of thought, affectivity or association in the viewer. Daniel Frampton updates these principles to describe how films “think,” or else encourage viewers to think during the temporal screening encounter (2006, p. 175ff). As with the urban examples we study here, Frampton understands there to be an inmixing of human and non-human elements during the entangled encounter between a thinking film and the viewer, with the “filmthoughts” (or stylistic temperament of the film) becoming included in the filmgoer’s thoughts, generating a heady cocktail that constitutes a unique blend or “third thought” (2006, p.  163). Other approaches view such an encounter as a socially and embodied interactive one, akin to “the process of working out a shared understanding” (Müller and Kappelhoff 2018, p. 86). In such contexts a film’s mise-en-scène reveals transversals with Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004a, 2004b) notion of agencement, which in its most common English translation, “assemblage,” loses its inbuilt etymological sense of harbouring “agency.”3 Ian Buchanan (2015) thus suggests “arrangement” is a more fitting translation, especially if thought of in terms of a “working arrangement,” or a “musical arrangement,” which implies an on-going process rather than a static situation. However, for Deleuze and Guattari assemblages/arrangements are dynamic and distributed admixtures that weave together “semiotic, material, and social flows simultaneously” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p.  23). In such descriptions we can locate further resonances with the

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cinematic notion of mise-en-scène, which in turn recalls Jane Bennett’s description of assemblages as “living, throbbing confederations” of human and inhuman forces (Bennett 2010, p.  23ff). Of particular pertinence here, though, is Bennett’s postcolonial refashioning of assemblage theory to incorporate the sinologist-philosopher François Jullien’s sustained engagement with the Chinese notion of shi (势). Retracing Jullien, Bennett notes how shi was originally a Chinese military term used to describe “a good general who must be able to read and then ride the shi of a configuration of moods, winds, historical trends, and armaments: shi names the dynamic force emanating from a spatio-­temporal configuration rather than from a particular element within it” (Bennett 2010, p. 35). However, in The Propensity of Things Jullien also traces how this under-theorised concept (which had historically reached its own conceptual vanishing point of sorts) had drifted over thousands of years from early descriptions bound up with the art of war to account for many other Chinese arts, crafts and practices: including landscape painting, calligraphy, religion, poetry and literature. Within and across these different domains, discourses and disciplines, shi reveals or exploits the “inherent potentiality at work in configuration” (Jullien 1995, pp. 14–15, emphasis in original). For us, the principle value of this overlooked concept is that it refers to “a potential born of disposition” (emphasis in original) that most often “consists in organising circumstances in such a way as to derive profit from them” (Jullien 1995, p. 27, emphasis ours). Although he does not engage with the cinema, we here creatively extend Jullien’s analysis to account for the “setting of an action” in film (and indeed cine-cities). After all, could not his descriptions of shi as a “poetic atmosphere” also be applied to the function and power of mise-en-­ scène? (See Jullien 1995, p. 130.) To such ends, we might momentarily turn to contemplation of 费穆 Fei Mu’s (Fey Mou) masterful cinematic techniques and his building and theorisations of xuanxiang (悬想 “suspension-­imagination”) and kongqi (空气 “atmosphere”)—two interleaving concepts that, as Fan notes, Fey devised (casually in his writing, but more rigorously through his films) to describe the affective and intellectual properties of cinematic mise-en-scène (see Fan 2015, p. 112). Like shi, xuanxiang and kongqi clearly gesture towards the efficacy of configurations, deployments, set-ups and dispositions (in time), which in and of themselves reveal propensities that unconceal themselves to and affect the subjects encountering them (Jullien 1995, pp.  16–17). Of relevance to our project here, Fan also links the expressive and affective qualities of this

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Chinese film-thinking to the writing of Deleuze, noting how Fey’s cinematic mise-en-scène makes the flows of desire palpable, while conflating the actual and the virtual. Reconsider in this light, then, Jullien’s description of shi effecting to open “up that which is concrete to that which lies beyond it, and for conveying through what is represented the suggestion of something ‘beyond’” (1995, p. 84). Beyond the arts, humanities and (the art of) warfare, shi is also a strategic concept that has been applied to the organisation and operations of Chinese socio-politics. In these realms Jullien maintains that shi should be understood as a “shaping of effect” or as “a policy of conditioning affects” for the successful management of power and “the most common patterns of behaviour” (Jullien 1995, pp. 37, 69, emphasis in original). The notion of shi here again betrays fecund overlaps with Deleuze and Guattari’s modelling of assemblages, which, Buchanan reminds us, were originally devised to help map the “flows of power” (Buchanan 2015, p.  382). However, here, shi offers a general theory of efficacy that “stands as a perfect example of how one can manage reality” (Jullien 1995, p. 25). Or, from the perspective of those in power, shi discloses aggregated potentialities cohering around the structures and flows of power, meaning that things can be stage-managed and arranged to desirably or profitably influence outcomes. It is precisely for these reasons that Jullien asserts that historically “[m]anipulation, not persuasion, was the Chinese way” (1995, p. 69). These of course are prevalent ideas. An illustrative example of which can be drawn from the Chinese government’s management of today’s internet (or the Chinese intranet, which blocks much access to the world wide web with its so-called “Great Fire Wall”). For, while it is common knowledge that China exercises tight net surveillance and censorship, many living outwith the PRC are often less aware of the promotion and practices of the so-called “fifty cents Army”—a large group of active online commentators estimated be in the hundreds of thousands, including paid bureaucrats—who are hired (or commanded) to saturate online platforms with pro-party messages, comments and articles in an attempt to, as Wikipedia currently renders it, “manipulate public opinion to the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party” (Wikipedia 2019). Consider in such light an article captioned “Thinking Chinese Strategic Spatial Planning with Gilles Deleuze,” where Jean Hillier and Kang Cao move beyond the writing of Jullien to forge connections with the ideas of Yu-Ming Liu, who offers manifold examples of shi-like concepts relevant to contemporary urban spatial planning in China. These include: shiqi (士

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气) “organisational morale”; minqi (民气) “public support”; jingqi (景气) which “implies economic vitality” and qishi (启示) which “implies mental force or energy, including intentions and emotions” (Liu in Hillier and Cao 2013, p.  394). The authors here implore contemporary Chinese urban planners to employ such principles to help nudge or guide their human traffic, or “to tackle a situation ahead of its actualisation: That is, to ‘steer it gently’ (Jullien 1995, p. 126) in a desired direction” (Hillier and Cao 2013, pp. 392, 395).4 In these ideas we might explicitly grasp how physical concrete arrangements and architectural machines manufacture charged affective atmospheres that exploit the virtual orientation between different bodies (and forms of body) in order to profit a series of overlapping and impinging ecologies and economies. Or again, in Guattarian language this time, we might detect a desire to tweak various external “assemblage synapses” as a means to achieve the “remote-controlling” of human subjects (2013, p.  60; 2010, p.  26)—ideas that forge interesting parallels with Patricia Pisters’ vision of modern mediated environments formulating an extended and immersive “brain-city” that human beings nerve with(in) (2012, pp. 290–96). Adapting Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to animate our social picture like this can help highlight significant differences exploited in the Chinese context. Certainly, Deleuze and Guattari saw capitalism reinvigorating and reempowering the state into a new despotic form of megamachine, which achieved absolute “machinic enslavement” by “overcoding” life with new forms of “despotic signification” (2004b, pp. 505–8). Using such models to approach the social in a “western” context often leads observers to note that while capitalism primarily manipulates through libidinal structures and affect, the state by contrast exerts control over individual and group subjects through policy and law (see e.g. Hickey-Moody 2019, p. 4–5). However, as is becoming clear, in the Chinese context we often find the two systems comingling and becoming blurred in unique admixtures, with state-approved urban media revealing the most overt and intense examples of such trends. Brian Massumi’s discussion of an “abductive politics” (of the arrangement of affects that appear to politically abduct us) thus becomes another relevant vector of analysis, in that there is an obvious proto-politics bound up with the arrangement of affects (Massumi 2015, p. 18).5 Here, affect, or the pre-personal, is singled out as being “much more important for understanding power, even state power narrowly defined, than concepts

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like ideology” (2015, p. 32). For affect operates immanently as “the virtual co-presence of potentials,” steering and guiding behaviour and actions before we ever become conscious of them, meaning that one must become vigilant and pay heed to “our angle of participation in processes larger than ourselves” (2015, pp. 5–6). Recalling Grosz’s assertion that the city itself should be understood as an “immediate locus for the production and circulation of power” (1999, p. 386), we aim throughout to expose how affect bound up in five or so shi-like arrangements operate to generate virtual relations, or the “felt reality of a relation,” into their experiential encounters (see e.g. Jenkins 2014, p. 14, emphasis in original). Which is to say, we recognise “relational structures” being parametrically composited into various modern city-spaces that transactionally and transversally invite or intend certain preferred forms of relation (or manners of relating) and action: or the “flip-side of affects” (2014, pp. 20, 15). In the following chapters we articulate such concepts to the broader intermeshing “reals” (or overlapping realities such as global economic realities, state realities, provincial realities, familial realities and subjective realities) that also impress themselves upon or find expression through these different shi-nematic set-ups.6 Before getting there, however, it becomes important to now turn our attention to our Realist approach to these intermeshing levels and “reals.” Thus, the next concept we address relates to what in the introduction we called our “Vertigo effect” method, which attempts to traverse different planes and scalar levels of contemporary Chinese socio-political reality.

Fractal Modelling Working with deliberately broad strokes, we might begin here with a rough sketch of the so-called three pillars of Chinese thought, with our first contour being the “naturalistic cosmology” and “organic holism” of Confucian thought. These are notions which, as Mary Evan Tucker and John Berthrong handily point out, can also be neatly articulated to the oldest work of the Chinese classics: the I Ching, or Book of Changes. In engineering this encounter they highlight how in both thought systems the universe is essentially “viewed as a vast integrated unit, not as discrete mechanistic parts. Nature is seen as unified, interconnected, and interpenetrating, constantly relating microcosm and macrocosm” (Tucker and Berthrong 1998, n.p.). In Taoist thought models we can also discover a comparable conceptualisation, whereby the miniature human body

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becomes a perfect analogue for the entire world; this in turn reflecting aspects of Buddhist philosophy which espouse the idea “that smallness is identical to largeness and that the customary proportions between things are completely illusory. Every microcosm can be as vast as the greatest macrocosm” (Jullien 1995, p. 95). There are of course religious, occult and secular Western counterparts. To stick with thinkers relevant to this project, Walter Benjamin’s pars pro toto method of analysis uses the part to apprehend the operations of whole, harnessing the microcosmic fragment to open up startling insights into the “here-and-now” of its historical production (1999). Benjamin’s influential analysis of the small “crystals of the total event” in his Arcades Project also anticipates Baudrillard’s later method, especially when he discusses the US as a form of hologrammatic (kinetic and cinematic) hyperreality (Baudrillard 2010a, p. 18ff): America is a giant hologram, in the sense that information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements. Take the tiniest little place in the desert, any old street in a Midwestern town, a parking lot, a Californian house, a Burger King or a Studbaker, and you have the whole of the US— South, North, East or West. (Baudrillard 2010b, p. 29)

We of course concede that China, like Baudrillard’s America, is an object that is “too immense” to understand in its totality and is always already an object “beyond interpretation.” Indeed, as discussed, we perceive China and Ningbo for that matter to be a specific form of what Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject (a massively distributed object that fills vast tracts of phase space and deep  time) that is forever withdrawing beyond comprehension or thought. Of necessity then, a slim volume such as this is required to screen out far more than it is ever capable of focusing on (we do not consider e.g. the belt and road projects, Chinese political engagement in Africa, trade wars with the US, disease control, the biopolitics of Uighur re-education camps in China’s Northwest, or the various historical breaks and on-going political and territorial disputes with Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau or Japan). Instead, we extract and analyse but one repeating form of pattern, which, as already indicated in the introduction, we utilise materialist assemblage theory to help describe (and to toggle in between different scales and levels of analysis). Félix Guattari’s ecosophical methods loom large here, then, particularly with regard to his modelling of three intermeshed or nested ecological

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registers, whereby mental, social and environmental ecologies become plicated under a prevailing system of Integrated World Capitalism (2010, p. 19)—or what we prefer to call semiocapitalism: a “semiotic operator” that “seizes individuals from the inside” with the ultimate goal of “controlling the whole of society” (Guattari in Genosko 2012, p. 149; see also Guattari 2010). In light of this, we too pay heed to the fact that “[v]ectors of subjectification do not necessarily pass through the individual, which in reality appears to be something like a ‘terminal’ for processes that involve human groups, socio-economic ensembles, data-processing machines, etc.” (Guattari 2010, p.  25), regarding which our dynamic modellings also draw inspiration from what in another context Adam Bryx and Brian Reynolds refer to as a “fractalactic” method (2012). This is a radical expansion of Guattari’s transversal models of subjective territory to include “the interactive flux of heterogenous and polyphonic aspects of subjectivity interwoven through individual and collective practices” (2012, p. 291), in this instance allowing us to focus on the transversal lines interconnecting various subject-objects within and through various shi-nematic urban settings and set-ups. Our kinematic fractal form diagram should not be taken as a static or fixed pattern, then, as we constantly place attention upon dynamic unfolding processes that demand we also embrace ecological models of thought and analysis. Recalling again our fractal diagram, DeLanda’s tweaking of similar Deleuzo-Guattarian models allows him to snap between different levels of a “multiscaled social reality,” which in turn permits new forms of critical insight (DeLanda 2006, p. 39). Such modellings, DeLanda maintains, can be broadly defined as the study of “objective processes of assembly,” the major advantage of which is their ability to investigate “a wide range of social entities, from persons to nation-states, [which can] be treated as assemblages constructed through very specific historical processes, processes in which language plays an important but not a constitutive role” (2006, p.  3).7 Similar Realist methods allow us to consider individuals as fractalactic assemblages nested within larger assemblages called cities, which are themselves nested within more expansive assemblages called provinces, which in turn form part of a larger nation state, which assumes its own place within a global system of integrated capitalism, and so on—somewhat recalling the graduated concentric cubicles found within a Chinese box system. As already indicated, we can also find a comparable use of scale-shifting perspectives in the work of Li, with his helpfully titled Economy, Emotion

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and Ethics in Chinese Cinema engaging with how once neoliberal capitalism took the place of state ideology it quickly became the ruling ideology in China: “thus providing basic direction and rationality to state policy, international relations, and the emerging values of the media,” which in turn set about restructuring and educating Chinese audiences, by emotionally instructing the contours of their new subjectivities and implanting appropriate desires (Wang Hui in Li 2016, p.  64ff). For commentators paying attention to avant-garde, underground and independent Chinese films of this period—such as Shohini Chaudhuri and Tonglin Lu—a national embrace of globalisation in the ideological vacuum of the post-­ Mao era first served to expose a characteristic “split or schizophrenic subjectivity” that apathetically registered “the shocks of endless historic reversals demanded by the ‘architects of one new China after another’” (Chaudhuri 2005, p. 99; see also Lu 2006, p. 125). This is a new schizoid identity that is economically drawn into relief by the title of Lin Xiaoping’s book Children of Marx and Coca-Cola (2009)—a title that establishes and describes a subjective portmanteau space of in-between-ness that speaks to Lu’s observations that the demands of such rapid changes forced a new generation to confront alone the new alien and alienating forms of “working environment, lifestyle, and value system” within a “world turned topsy-turvy by the worship of the material god, money” (2006, p. 125).

A Fractalactic Case Study: Or, “The House Always Wins” To illustrate what thinking at a multiscalar fractalactic level entails, we might now briefly return to our example of China’s response to the 2008 global crisis as an illustrative case in point. What might first strike about this is the government’s radical geological terraforming and urban restructuring of the national topology and topography, which served to transversally alter forever not only China’s existing ecological environment but also the flows, movements and actions of individual and collective bodies including animals, plants, minerals, provincial governments and social groups (or group subjects), in addition to (as we will see in our next chapter) the dreams and desires of everyday citizens. We might recall that the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 was triggered by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the US. In the same period China was undergoing rapid processes of  urbanisation,

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infrastructural modernisation and economic and financial restructuring intensified by the build up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As discussed earlier, in the wake of the Olympics, and in response to the unfolding global crisis, China began engaging in internal parametric and coefficient tweaking of its interior social and economic order—so as to better weather (and profit from) the global crisis. Beyond buying foreign debt, China also began intensifying urban building on the home front, pouring around 6651 million tonnes of concrete to help prevent the nation from economically sinking (Harvey 2016). How? Harvey notes that at least a quarter of China’s GDP was derived from housing construction around 2008, with this unequalled drive for building property emerging in tandem with concurrent infrastructural development: including the erection of modern rail networks and road systems. This meant that “roughly half of China’s GDP and almost all of its growth (which bordered on 10 per cent until recently) were attributable to investment in the built environment” (Harvey 2016, p. 2). In these ramped up construction drives we might also begin to perceive the literal crystallisation and concretisation of China’s new ideology. To get a sense of the scale of these developments, we might also return to Bill Gates’ observation that shortly thereafter, between 2011 and 2013, China poured more concrete than did the US during the whole span of the twentieth century (see McCarthy 2014, n.p.; Harvey 2016, p.  1). Tied to this radical environmental transformation were large amounts of financial engineering and economic stimulation packages designed to promote mass consumption. It is worth noting here that because China’s financial services industry was then in a relatively nascent stage, and the Chinese banks were instructed to offer very low interest rates on savings, the appropriate conditions were set up wherein Chinese consumers had very limited options for financial investment other than the purchase of residential real estate (see e.g. Fincher 2014, p. 95; Gabrieli et al. 2018). Leta Hong Fincher articulates this form of social engineering to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, noting how his “interpretation of the housing market as the social construction of demand and supply” thus became “especially true for China” (2014, p. 95), conditions that also help us recast and re-­ understand Baudrillard’s view upon the limited freedom individuals have within a capitalist economy. For, far from expressing their own subjective desires and needs through their purchasing of Chinese real estate, it is rather the Chinese economic system itself that “induces the individual function and the parallel functionality of objects and needs” (see e.g. Baudrillard 2019, p.  133). Needs here abstractly function as a form of

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social labour, as such, with the subject and their subjectivity ultimately being “produced by the economic system like unit cells of its reproduction” (p. 133). Of course, Baudrillard would be quick to point out that these new forms of economic reality emerged alongside technologies of the screen, which further helped to blur and confuse any meaningful distinction between reality and fiction, life and media. Linked to this, Fincher notes how concomitant with this ecological and economic situation a novel combination of state and private interest also led to the Chinese state media manufacturing and promulgating new forms of neoliberal myth associated with the new “Chinese Dream.” This either implicitly or explicitly proclaimed that the purchasing of a new home was a bare necessity for middle-class identity or any self-respecting Chinese citizen wanting to start a family (Fincher 2014, p. 95). Various other observers have similarly exposed how the state-sponsored media—including the mythical commercial films we will explore in the following chapters—strove to inculcate and influence this new consumer public in order to give rise to new “neoliberal subjects” who increasingly “govern themselves in accordance with the priorities of the state” (Greenlah and Winckler in Fincher 2014, p. 29). Which is to say, the production and control of what Li describes as Sinicised versions of homo economicus (Li 2016, pp. 59–60). From these large-scale perspectives, individuals might be recognised as becoming enrobed by the movements of a larger event which sublimates (or else excludes) them, so that they begin acting as conduits for broader flows (of signs, desire, money, bodies, genes, etc.). Such heterogeneous flows in turn account for the promotion and normalisation of what we might call after Zygmunt Bauman new forms of consumer orientation which “first developed as a by-product, and an outlet, of the industrial pattern of control, [but have] been finally prised from the original stem and transformed into a self-sustained and self-perpetuating pattern of life” (1982, p. 179). This unfolding situation also helps us to grasp the rapidly and radically transforming urban mise-en-scène of Capitalism’s Second (semiocapital) Coming to China, while exposing how different scaled assemblages partake in the tweaking of economic coefficients and the manipulation of social mechanisms and desires, including through a variety of urban media productions. In this example the manifold forms of stimulation and manipulation saw the Chinese property market bubbling (see e.g. Gabrieli et al. 2018) into “a veritable casino of speculative volatility” (Harvey 2016, p. 3), with

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the national house price index rising some 332% from its 2000 level by 2015 (Gabrieli et al. 2018). We will return to this process in more detail in the following chapter, which offers a microanalytic case study wrestled from within this broader context and pattern. This has, as part of a larger statistical picture, helped China to now boast one of the highest home ownership rates in the world: currently hovering around 85%, even if this is skewed to benefit, at the subjective level of the fractal model, heterosexual Han men more than any other subject group or demographic (see e.g. Fincher 2014, p. 93).

Concerning Individuals and Their Freedom Adopting such a large-scale vantage might help us to frame how a nation state with a new consumer economy and semiocapitalist structures promotes the production of entrepreneurial consumer cities, full of modern machines for living, which in turn promote the production, and provoke the transactional desires, of its consumer subjects. From this scale of analysis we might be tempted to say something along the lines of: Chinese consumers do not collectively produce a Chinese consumer society, but rather a Chinese consumer society produces individual Chinese consumers. But here, problematic questions surrounding individual freedoms, autonomy or sovereignty begin to raise their head. On the topic of which we might here briefly turn to a position articulated by Michel Serres, who asks: How many women and men live free? Slaves of a party, of an ideology, if it’s a question of politics, of societal conventions, of cosmetic or intellectual fashions, of any pressure group in which clones surround a perverse leader, of voracious appetites disgusting to others, of an organised network in which paths always lead somewhere, would they agree to pay the price of a free life with open relations? Who doesn’t instead rush towards a directed existence and directed relations, as though having a passion to carry an emblem, the trace of a classification, a brand of party, car or clothing, all relations of belonging? In its school, each fish orients itself parallel to the others, directed by some social magnetic field. It doesn’t invent its relations. (2018, p. 62)

Serres’ vision of a collectively oriented and relational multiplicity or multiplicit-body resonates here with Baudrillard’s notion of subjects being social before they are individual (2019, p. 133), or the individual itself (as

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conceptual unit) being a (by)product of certain forms of society. And while our findings and observations in what follows might be thought to confirm this up to a point, such perspectives also strike us as problematic, precisely because they appear to privilege a systemic (read theoretical) approach over a sovereign or subjective one (read empirical or ethnographic) based on individual autonomy or freedom of choice. And while many of our models are in part indebted to, or informed by, statistical causality and aggregate patterns derived from collective consumption data, we also take pains to frame how the singular or subjective level of the fractalactic picture plays out, while cataloguing certain forms of freedom that are suggested by our empirical data (at least within certain parameters and perimeters). This blended approach, of top-down and bottom-up analyses, we hope, might help iron out some of the tensions perceived between theory and observation, statistical and subjective approaches. Indeed, broad statistical (what we might after Steve Tomasula (2014) call posthuman) pictures can obscure much, and so we recognise that our study must also focus upon individual bodies (or the human level), which likewise participate in specific transactional blends and encounters within broader assemblages (families, friends, peer groups and so on). In trying to synthesise these we might again channel the work of Grosz, who describes bodies both as “hinge(s) between the population and the individual” (that have their own “distribution, habits, alignments, pleasures, norms, and ideals”) and “the ostensive object of governmental regulation,” a perspective from which the city and its organisation become a privileged site of power and a “mode for the regulation and administration of subjects” (even if any given “urban space in turn [becomes] reinscribed by the particularities of its occupation and use”) (Grosz 1999, p. 386). As we hope to show in the following chapters, new forms of urban arrangement help to sift and sort bodies in order to extract resources or endow them with new forms of cultural or semiotic capital. From this vantage we approach these new forms of postsocialist shi-nematic machine as cognitive and physiological orientators, setting out and setting up transactional affordance spaces that hail consumer-citizens in predetermined systemic ways that, at higher levels of statistical analysis, make (collective) consumption a form of cultural imperative or obligation. We do not want to suggest by this that all individuals perfectly or uncritically adhere to the norms, nor that the Chinese follow imperatives and norms more than their contemporaries elsewhere in the world. Rather, drawing on the work of DeLanda (who himself draws on Emile Durkheim and William H. Durham)

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to contest what we can here call cultural determinism, we believe that “absolute imposition and free individual choice are best taken as idealized poles of a continuum, with most actual behaviour falling somewhere in between, as a mixture of the two” (DeLanda 2000, p. 145). This demands in turn that we also search for different enforcement mechanisms and normalising forces, which within our fractal diagram can be divided roughly into those that flow vertically and horizontally, with both being capable of impacting a given individual’s actions and sense of social obligation in various admixtures depending on context and the individual. These often range from top-down hierarchies (from one-to-many in the case of state to the subject, say, or parents acting upon a child, or even one-to-one via an economic structure) to influences felt from the side (cultural replicators coming through informal social networks, say, or peer-to-peer groups, and even one-to-many structures via advertising, memes or social influencers).8 For Clarke, building on ideas borrowed from de Certeau, while we must therefore concede that no consumer subject is sovereign, they are also “never simply ‘passive and guided by established rules’” (2003, p. 67). Which is to say, consumer citizens do retain a certain amount of post hoc autonomy when it comes to their lifestyle choices, while the notion of lifestyle in and of itself is an affordance and pre-determining requirement of a consumer society. Ultimately a Pyrrhic victory in Clarke’s view, then, as the forms of “democratic” freedom that consumerism offers individuals, or allows people to exercise, is in the last analysis an illusory choice. And furthermore, if freedom of choice becomes “the definitive feature of the consumer society,” it also paradoxically becomes a strict necessity of sorts, whereby as Giddens has it “we have no choice but to choose” (in Clarke 2003, p. 145). Arriving here, we might again turn to DeLanda’s remodelling of assemblage theory, which although rejects the “atomism of neoclassical economists as well as the holism of structuralist-functionalist sociologists” (2000, p. 19) does offer another way that allows us to preserve: “methodological individualism” (appropriate to any bottom-up perspective) but rejects the idea that individuals make decisions solely according to self-­ interested (maximizing) calculations, and instead models individuals as rule followers subject to different types of normative and institutional constraints that apply collectively. (DeLanda 2000, p. 19)

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For sure Chinese urban cinema and shi-nema constitute key sights/sites of obligatory consumption, albeit predominantly hailing those who have already become seduced or absorbed by the system (or event) or have been able to gain the so-called freedom that consumerism offers. As we will see, the migrant workers building these cities, for example, are often excluded or alienated from the products of their backbreaking labour and the forms of “choices” they afford others. Accordingly, consumer citizens might constitute a form of “mirror system” within this broader fractalactic picture (perhaps generating a fractalised mise-en-abyme), presumably having internalised and begun enacting the (often rewarding) duty-like demands made of them by the prevailing structures (forms and functions). Clarke again says: The seduced of society have been granted a kind of freedom, no longer being coerced into compliance with the law, on the implicit understanding that it will be in their own self-interest to play by the rules of the consumer society; that they will, however cynically, accept and internalize the belief that this society is suited to them, and therefore they to it. (2003, p. 91)

In its different manifestations, the postsocialist Ningbo screenscape is here in equal measure a system of seduction and exclusion, freedom and repression, with repression and seduction formulating “the double face of the selfsafe structuring principle” (Clarke 2003, p.  92). Revisiting Baudrillard, Clarke further notes how within such societies consumption increasingly “assumes the force of a moral imperative, albeit that of a ‘fun morality’” (Clarke 2003, p. 145). Or, in old money psychoanalytic terms (another growth industry in modern China today, incidentally), we might discover articulated to the obligation to choose products, services and signs the tyrannical Lacanian-Žižekian (superego) imperative or injunction to “Enjoy!” (2007). That is, as Lu renders it with regard to the Chinese context: “Unlimited freedom remains a collective fantasy that traps everyone in unrealistic expectations of enjoyment” (2006, p. 135).

4E Psychogeography In between any two given relational levels of our fractal model we locate forms of transaction and extraction that expose the radical blending or blurring of subject-object registers. At the level of where a Ningbo citizen interacts with a given shi-nematic assemblage in Chaps. 3, 5 and 6, for instance, we have

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thus found it best to approach these forms of transactionism through what we call a 4E psychogeographic method. This being our updating and détournement of Debord’s earlier formulation of psychogeography as the “study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals” (1981, p. 5),9 which, as previously intimated, we hereafter deepen and thicken courtesy of more recent insights offered by so-called “E” or “4E” approaches. Coined by philosopher of mind Shaun Gallagher (according to Rowlands 2013, p. 219), the term “4E” collects under it an expanding body of results from contemporary neuro and  cognitive sciences that highlight why cognition (including emotional and affective states) is not something solely residing within individual heads and minds or even bodies, but is rather  best viewed as an embodied, embedded, extended and enacted activity. Each of these Es represents an approach to studying cognition (or a dimension of cognition), which rejects computational models characteristic of cybernetics by instead turning to people’s bodily structures and biological functioning, their interactions with and in a given environment, and the processes of organism-environment coupling and incorporation that constitute their experiences of moving, thinking and feeling with others  in the world; which is to say,  they equate cognition with “the experience of being alive” (Di Paolo et al. 2018, p. 45). While acknowledging specialised debates about the distinctions between the different Es (Gallagher 2017) or aiming to add to the number of Es (Johnson 2017, p. 34), we use the umbrella terms “embodied” or “ecological” cognition to specify which dimension or E is salient whenever necessary. The added value of such 4E concerns, we maintain, is that they extend the Debordian psychogeographic model by expanding what we mean by the “psy” domains (conscious rational thought and emotion and the unconscious, see e.g. Guattari 2013, p. 32) to account for an expanded range of feelings and a simultaneously broadened and decentred picture of the prehodological urban geography—the thought-felt extended consciousness gleaned from neuroscientific studies and philosophy of mind models. The 4E psychogeographic models we favour throughout thus speak to our Realist orientation towards the material and illusory world and inform our transactional understanding of the embodied citizen-­ subjects whose lived (cognitive) experience and understanding of the world results from extending, embedding and enacting within an affordance space (Gallagher 2017, p. 174), which itself can be distinguished as

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a specific ecology of media (including space, bodies, objects, sounds, smells, and a host of other objects, signs and affects). Certainly, it is important to recognise how, as Daniel Reynolds recently frames it in his Media in Mind, “the bulk of the ‘work’ of media use occurs in a realm below or separate from consciousness—cognition or the unconscious—inaccessible to conscious thought” (2019, p.  5). That is, while our interviews and discussions with subjects might offer a psychological insight into a given phenomenon or feeling, we treat them here as interactional sense-making phenomena in and of themselves, while our empirical, relational and materialist study also pays heed to a range of inhuman actors and objects that assemble with bodies to influence, guide, steer, direct or nudge actions and behaviours in ways that individual subjects may not be (consciously) aware of, or even perceive (reifying what neurologists describe in terms of a certain form of mind blindness, wherein individuals cannot account for their actions and decisions but can perform them naturally and skilfully nonetheless; cf. Rietveld 2008). This echoes Pisters’ notion that in our modern world of ubiquitous screens and digital media, humans increasingly function as neural conduits within an expansive braincity, or brain-­world (2012, pp. 290–96). These 4E encounters are at work whenever a subject-citizen moves into composition with other subject-citizens and urban media, we argue, which work upon each other for differing yet overlapping periods and durations—warranting a return to the idea of entanglement in enactive cognitive science as “the presence of deep correlations between processes at multiple timescales in each body” (Di Paolo et al. 2018, p. 77). To illustrate the model of embodied cognition, Malafouris (2013) explains that “bodily features play a significant role in how or what an organism thinks and in how it makes sense of the world” (p. 59). The hand, for example, as well as being “an instrument for manipulating an externally given objective world by carrying out the orders issued to it by the brain” must also be recognised as “one of the main perturbatory channels through which the world is perceived and classified” (Malafouris 2013, p. 60). And while embedded cognition broadens the scope of cognitive activity from the body to its material, social and cultural environment (Wilson and Foglia 2017), extended models of cognition seek to explain how “relevant external features are active, playing a crucial role in the here-and-now” of a cognitive process (Clark and Chalmers 1998, p. 9; emphasis in original). Classic examples include the use of touchstones, the blind person’s cane as

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an embodied  “feeler” or, in more modern times, the pocket diary or smartphone as an extrasomatic memory (Clark 1997, p. 66; Kirsh 1995). An enactive view of the relation between cognition, bodies and environments offers another different slant to the somewhat functional focus of embodied, extended and distributed perspectives (Gallagher 2017). Originating in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology (Merleau-­ Ponty 1945/2014), enaction forces attention to how, as Varela et  al. (1991) put it, “cognitive structures emerge from the kinds of recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided” (p. 176). The terms “emerge,” “enable” and “guide” are key constructs here, indexing as they do the gradual and bi-directional processes of perceptual adjustment and adaptation required to accomplish (cognitive) tasks ranging from the everyday (e.g. reaching for a smartphone, opening a door, drinking from a Starbucks coffee cup) to the more complex (e.g. taking a language seminar, dancing to a pop song, discussing a problem). Instead of relying on the build-up of symbolic manipulation of inner mental models to accomplish such actions, following enactivist Gallagher (2017), the embodied mind dynamically “responds to the world rather than represents it” (p. 47; emphasis in original). Taking into account the biological, emotional and affective aspects of our embodied lives becomes relevant here too, as factors such as “hunger, fatigue and pain” are among those found to “modulate body-environment coupling, and become part of the reciprocal causal relations that shape cognitive process” (p. 41). Such ideas have entailed a broader reframe in much of media studies of late, and in part account for the increasing study of pre-conscious or non-­ conscious phenomena. Steven Shaviro’s recent work on Discognition (2015) makes here for an illustrative case in point, focusing as it does on why things external to, or prior to, consciousness are important to our Realist drive. Indeed, in one telling passage Shaviro incorporates the work of Thomas Metzinger, noting how: Our minds perpetually suffer from ‘things like inattentional blindness, change blindness, masking, perceptual asynchrony, processing lags, and so on … You could make a career out of cataloguing all the ways in which consciousness is either blinkered or outright deceptive … Out of all the information our brains crunch every second, only a tiny sliver makes it to conscious experience—less than a millionth, by some estimates.’ The seeming richness of my first-person perspective is a hallucinatory effect of this fundamental sparseness. (Shaviro 2015, pp. 11–12)

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In writing Chinese Urban Shi-nema, we hope to contribute another “tiny sliver” into the conscious experience of readers interested in millennial China today. The following chapters aim to add further “hallucinatory effect” to our collective (alien and domestic) understanding of Chinese societies, subjectivities and the interactions that we find in its shi-nematic, fractally modelled, 4E psychogeographic spaces.

Notes 1. Mao accordingly banned this Trojan horse of Western cine-Imperialism— that affectively promoted hedonism and individualism—from projecting its contagious wares on the PRC’s screens for the following thirty years (see e.g. Ying Hong in Su 2011, p. 191; Xiao 2011, pp. 68–9; Zhu and Nakajima 2010, p. 18), thus carving out space for the Republic’s new forms of socially responsible and morally prescriptive pedagogical-propagandist cinema. Similar anti-Hollywood views were prevalent outside China too, of course, with European leftists such as Herbert Ihering warning in 1926 that the Hollywood film was more dangerous than Prussian militarism: with millions of people being rendered passive and uniform after being “co-opted by American taste” (in Stam 2000, p. 64). 2. There are clear resonances here with Guy Debord’s view that urbanism is “capitalism’s seizure of the natural and human environment” in a manner designed to remake reality in its own image and shape the territory to promote a limited collection of consumerist tasks (1983, p. 169). 3. In The Deleuze Dictionary Graham Livesey describes assemblages as “constellations of objects, bodies, expressions, qualities and territories that come together for varying periods of time to ideally create new ways of functioning” (2010, p.  18). As J.  Macgregor Wise and John Law also highlight, assemblages are most often associated with notions of “putting together,” “arrangement,” “laying out,” “layout” or “fitting” (Wise 2011, p. 92) and encompass a broad range of meanings that include “to arrange, to dispose, to fit up, to combine, to order” (Law in Buchanan 2015). 4. Hillier and Cao also state that “the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari have sufficient resonances with classical Chinese philosophy to be inspirational for the development of a theory and methodology for strategic spatial planning in a spatially coextensive, fragmented, plural country. This would be a hybrid Deleuzism: “a palimpsest of nonsynchronous, emergent, and residual formations, a mixture of various space-times, and an overlap of different modes of production” (Lu et al. 2004, p. 13)” (2013, p. 392). 5. Massumi’s notion of an “abductive politics” is inspired by the work of the philosopher C.  S. Peirce, who used the word “abduction” to refer to

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“thought that is still couched in bodily feeling, that is still fully bound up with unfolding sensation as it goes into action but before it has been able to articulate itself in conscious reflection and guarded language” (see Massumi 2015, pp. 9–10). 6. We might recall here that beyond Jullien’s description of shi as a deliberate “setting up” or arrangement of things, in English the idiomatic use of the word “set-up” variously refers to a form of deception, whereby a victim or dupe plays an unwitting role in a contrived event, practical joke or prank, as well as meaning to erect, assemble, lay plans for, establish, provide capital for or put in an upright position. 7. We remain aware that there are always larger and smaller scale assemblages stretching up and away, or down and below, from our chosen territories of analysis. Before and beneath the psychological subject there is of course the biome population of their gut, say, their cellular arrangement of organs, muscles and bone, neuronal networks, the genetic substratum, and the universes of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles below these. Over and above the nation state there remains a global marketplace of trade, politics and ecologies of other nation states and trading blocks, and the geopolitical arrayment of lands and seas in relation to the Sun, and so forth. To such end our territory of analysis, in both time and space, is necessarily engulfed and given context by other larger and smaller scales that either encompass them or serve as their platform. 8. Such flows and structures also co-define the fractal form we attempt to sketch out throughout this book, with the vertical and horizontal inter-­ weaves or cross-meshes helping us perceive how consumer societies are “programmatically geared towards ‘deflecting’ the possibility of resistance,” while the consumer subjects are not just reduced to inhuman objects brought to life and made to act as per a ventriloquist’s dummy, but rather semi-autonomous subject-objects that can and do undertake individual acts (Clarke 2003, p. 68). 9. Debord’s larger description goes thus: “The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by

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this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery” (1981, p. 5)

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Grosz, E. (1999). Bodies-Cities. In J.  Prince & M.  Shildrick (Eds.), Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader (pp. 381–387). New York: Routledge. Guattari, F. (2010). The Three Ecologies (I. Pindar & P. Sutton, Trans.). London: Continuum. Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic Cartographies (A.  Goffey, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury. Harvey, D. (2016). The Ways of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hickey-Moody, A. (2019). Deleuze and Masculinity. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Jenkins, E. S. (2014). Special Affect. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Johnson, M. (2017). Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason. How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding. The University of Chicago Press. Jullien, F. (1995). The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China. New York: Zone Books. Hillier, J., & Cao, K. (2013). Deleuzian Dragons: Thinking Chinese Strategic Spatial Planning with Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze Studies, 7(3), 390–405. Kirsh, D. (1995). The Intelligent Use of Space. Artificial Intelligence, 73, 31–68. Kracauer, S. (1995). The Mass Ornament: Wiemar Essays (T.  Y. Levin, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Li, D. L. (2016). Economy, Emotion and Ethics in Chinese Cinema: Globalization on Speed. London and New York: Routledge. Livesey, G. (2010). Assemblage. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lu, T. (2006). Trapped Freedom and Localized Globalism. In P.  Pickowicz & Y. Zhang (Eds.), From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (pp.  123–142). New  York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.. Malafouris, L. (2013). How Things Shape the Mind. A Theory of Material Engagement. MIT Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the Body. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88. McCarthy, N. (2014, December 5). China Poured More Concrete in 3 Years Than the U.S. Used in in the Entire 20th Century. Forbes. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2014). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Morin, E. (2010). The Stars. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Müller, C., & Kappelhoff, H. (2018). Cinematic Metaphor: Experience— Affectivity—Temporality. De Gruyter. Mumford, L. (1970). The Culture of Cities. San Diego, NY, London: HBJ Book. Mumford, L. (1971). The Myth of the Machine: Vol. 1. London: Harcourt Publishers Ltd. Pisters, P. (2012). The Neuro Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Pratt, G., & Juan, R. M. S. (2014). Film and Urban Space: Critical Possibilities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rietveld, E. (2008). Situated Normativity: The Normative Aspect of Embodied Cognition in Unreflective Action. Mind 117(468), 973–1001. Reynolds, D. (2019). Media in Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rowlands, M. (2013). The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. MIT Press. Serres, M. (2018). The Incandescent. London: Bloomsbury. Shaviro, S. (2015). Discognition. London: Repeater Books. Sontag, S. (2008). On Photography. London: Penguin Classics. Stam, R. (2000). Film Theory: An Introduction. London: Blackwell. Su, W. (2011). Resisting Cultural Imperialism, or Welcoming Cultural Globalization? China’s Extensive Debate on Hollywood Cinema from 1994 to 2007. Asian Journal of Communication, 21(2), 186–201. Tomasula, S. 2014. Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative. Flusser Studies 09. Retrieved from http://www.flusserstudies.net/ sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/tomasulaemergence.pdf. Tucker, M.  E., & Berthrong, J. (1998). Introduction: Setting the Context. In Confucianism and Ecology Volume. Centre for the Study of World Religions; Harvard School of Divinity. Retrieved from http://fore.yale.edu/publications/books/cswr/confucianism-introduction/. Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press. Virilio, P. (2002). The Overexposed City. In G. Bridge & S. Watson (Eds.), The Blackwell City Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Wikipedia. (2019). 50 Cent Party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_ Cent_Party Wilson, R. A., & Foglia, L. (2017). Embodied Cognition. In: E. N.Z., Ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Stanford. Williams, K. (2013). Dubliners, ‘The Magic-Lantern Business’ and Precinema. In J. Nash (Ed.), James Joyce in the Nineteenth Century (pp. 215–233). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, K. (2016). James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before and After Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Williams, E. C. (2017). Shard Cinema. London: Repeater Books. Wise, J. M. (2011). Assemblage. In Stivale C. J. Ed., 91–101, Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Durham: Acumen. Xiao, J. (2011). The Quest for Memory: Documentary and Fiction in Jia Zhangke’s Films. Senses of Cinema, 59(June).

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Zhang, Z. (2005). An Amorous History of the Silver Screen. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Zhu, Y., & Nakajima, S. (2010). The Evolution of Chinese Film as an Industry. In Y.  Zhu & S.  Rosen (Eds.), Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema (pp. 55–70). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Zielinski, F. (1999). Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (G. Custance, Trans.). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Filmography Chung Kuo, Cina. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. 1972. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Directed by Don Siegel. 1956.

CHAPTER 3

Commercial Overground Shi-Nema: Some Notes on Cinematicity and Its Propensity for Selling Dream (Un)Real Estate in Contemporary China Ultimately, what is being consumed in the consumer society is consumption itself. The last point is best exemplified by advertising. In watching or reading advertisements people are consuming them; they are consuming consumption. —George Ritzer (1998, p. 24) A house is a machine for living. —Le Corbusier (1986, p. 95) Because every film is part of the economic system it is also part of the ideological system, for “cinema” and “art” are branches of ideology. None can escape… —Comolli and Narboni (1990, p. 60)

Herbert Marcuse once observed that we might detect a form of totalitarianism at play whenever we find an “economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests” (2002, p. 5). In this chapter we zoom in on the despotic forms and functions of commercial urban cinema and shi-nema, which appear designed to manipulate the Chinese into enacting different, but inter-related, types of consumption, with the latter encouraging people to invest their money in high-rise urban real estate in order to bolster the national economy. Our first shi-nematic investigation thus draws upon the experiences of a local Ningbonese woman who was part of the post-1980s generation. When we © The Author(s) 2020 D. H. Fleming, S. Harrison, Chinese Urban Shi-nema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_3

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joined her, she was self-employed, unmarried (but dating) and visiting the showrooms around the city with a view towards purchasing her own real estate. This key participant (who we shall refer to as X) granted us access to the photos and video clips she had taken during her showroom tours to naturally document her apartment-buying experience and shared with us the promotional posters, leaflets, flyers and web links that either she had procured from the different sites or had been sent to her social media accounts. To add to this archival data, we subsequently joined X on several return visits to the showrooms, occasioning further photos and note taking, as well as videos of her inside the showroom context, allowing us to both reconstruct and observe first hand the contrived ecologies and patterns of interaction taking place in at least five generic showrooms. We ultimately show how these glamorous mechanisms of lifestyle seduction— that constellate and unbridle signs, forces and affects to impact the thoughts, feelings and actions of potential buyers—are semiocapitalist apparatuses of incorporation consistent with a broader consumer society diagram. For reasons that will shortly become clear, the Chinese film genre we find most perspicacious for setting up and enframing our ethnographic analysis of these shi-nematic showrooms are “Huallywood” rom coms,1 or more precisely mainstream “action-image” (more on which below) films whose “improbable realism” (see e.g. Yhcam in Frampton 2006, p.  3) appears to have become overrun by the logic of semiocapitalism (with Chinese characteristics). These are mainstream commodities that articulate glamorous consumerist lifestyles with a political “motif of aspiration” (Khoo 2019) and thus exemplify the type of filmmaking that Chris Berry dubs Chinese “aspirational realism” (2009, p.  17), a form of axiomatic cinema that typically focuses on so-called “ordinary people” who live a lifestyle considerably more affluent than that of real ordinary people, but not beyond their imagination. This could be called “aspirational cinema”—it encourages not only the dream of finding the perfect partner, but also the perfect car, the perfect dress, the perfect sofa, and so on. (Berry 2009, p. 117)

Of relevance to our broader arguments below, Berry reads these romantic aspirational films as attempting to fashion “a new faith in modernity” that encourages consumption and the enacting of “material acquisition” (2009, p.  117). This is a superficial consumption message that appears articulated to the Chinese Communist Party’s broader zhu xuanlü (main

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melody or leitmotif )—a dominant political elucidation associated with the modernising nation teleologically advancing into a better, more prosperous future (see e.g. Lin 2010, p. 60; Zhang 2007, p. 2; Jaffee 2006, p. 98). It is to these forms of cinema that we first turn, albeit using two specific examples to sketch out the broader context, before then zooming in on our first architectural case study, which explores the transactional desires and operations put into play by urban shi-nematic arrangements designed (or intended) to increase real estate sales.

On Aspirational Commercial Cinema In their influential “Maoist” Cahiers du Cinema editorial “Cinema/ Ideology/Criticism” (1990 [1969]), from which we take our overhanging epigraph, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni assert that “every film is political, inasmuch as it is determined by the ideology which produces it (or within which it is produced which stems from the same thing)” (1990, p. 60, emphasis in original). From this economic and political perspective film does not so much index and re-project some concrete ontological reality but rather reproduces “the vague, unformulated, untheorized, unthought-out-world of the dominant ideology” (p.  60). Recalling our fractal form modelling described in Chap. 2, cinema here emerges as a branch and tool of ideology through which the “world communicates itself to itself” (p. 60), meaning that any given “film is ideology presenting itself to itself, talking to itself, learning about itself” (p. 61). Of course there can be different positions or reactions a director or artist takes with regard to the prevailing ideology—with some like Jia Zhangke (whose art cinema we explore in the next chapter) producing films that actively “disrupt or possibly even sever the connection between the cinema and its ideological function,” while others (like the filmmakers we explore in this chapter) patently produce commodities “imbued through and through with the dominant ideology in pure and unadulterated form” (Comolli and Narboni 1990, p. 61). For the most part, articulated to such products is the Chinese viewer, who although might presumably decode the films in a negotiated or oppositional manner, in the dominant form might be thought of, as per our George Ritzer epigraph, as being uncritically encouraged to consume consumption (1998, p. 24; see also Hall 2005). Apposite to our case studies below, it is worth noting how Ritzer also sees the dominant ideology of consumer societies being fashioned in order to mislead participants into believing that they

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are (collectively as a nation, if not individually) “affluent, fulfilled, happy and liberated” (1998, p. 24). The two emblematic aspirational films we wish to isolate here were both familiar to, and well liked by, our female participant: Wo zhi nv ren xin/I Know Women’s Hearts (Daming Chen 2011)—a Chinese-language remake of the Hollywood film starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt, What Women Want (Nancy Meyers 2000)—and the high-tower musical based on Sylvia Chang’s 2008 stage play Hua li shang ban zu/Design for Living (Johnnie To 2015). In their re-imagining and re-visioning of existing Hollywood narratives and genres, these choice Huallywood examples of “Chinese Dream” cinema also help us grasp how global capitalism exploits and amplifies difference as much as promoting homogenisation, by serving here to illuminate the special role women play as a key contemporary consumer force/target within modern China, even if they are also often simultaneously excluded from the purchase and ownership of real estate (the main focus of this chapter) by government policy (see e.g. Fincher 2014). I Know Women’s Hearts finds Andy Lau play Sun Zigang, a divorced father employed by a Beijing advertising company. Throughout, Zigang becomes increasingly bothered by the appearance of a new female boss named Li Yilong (Gong Li). After a fairy-tale accident involving electricity, the misogynistic Zigang is shocked to suddenly be able to “overhear” the private inner thoughts of all the women he meets: a mental super ability that both derives humour and grants him an edge in the modern advertising industry.2 With respect to the film’s more peripheral female characters, it is telling to hear how their voiced imaginaries (read private thoughts and desires) become unabashedly consumerist in nature. Indeed, as one reviewer puts it: “A lot of the inner monologues that [Zigang] picks up on have to do with women wanting men to buy them stuff, so to some extent he learns that he was right all along—women want rich men” (Anders 2011, n.p.). This is a sentiment that clearly resonates with another well-­ known (recently manufactured) Chinese myth or saying that the state-run media ensure that almost every contemporaneous citizen knows by heart: “jiahan jiahan, chuanyi chifan” which Leta Hong Fincher translates as “marry a man, marry a man, for clothes to wear, and food to eat,” an ideological aphorism which implies that a woman must turn to a man for all of life’s essentials, including most importantly (in life and our chapter) a home (Fincher 2014, p. 52). Of course, we must note here that what these fictional women want, if you will, is precisely what the real sponsors of the commercial film want

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them to want, which is to say, their strategically placed branded lifestyle products, which viewers consume here as paradigmatic semiocapitalist super signs (see e.g. Baudrillard 1998, p.  142). In Chinese aspirational cinema, branded consumer goods increasingly appear to operate within a new cultural system that they help co-constitute, while serving to organise and structure the social world and its meanings (see e.g. Clarke 2003, p 59). Crucial to note here is that I Know Women’s Hearts was a lucrative example of a Chinese New Year Comedy, which as a popular genre and mode has increasingly become (in)famous for its brand tie-ins and product placements. Certainly, the study of other New Year films (particularly those made by Feng Xiaogang, China’s so-called “father of product placement” (Li 2015, p.  143)) has led critical commentators such as Shuyu Kong (2007) to lament that today in China “the advertising business is now so close to film production and consumption that advertising has become an integral part of the formal features and content of commercial films” (in Woodland 2018, p. 44).3 This idea was fictionally and functionally intensified (in a fractalactic act of mise-en-abyme) by I Know Women’s Hearts being set inside the glamorous world of Beijing advertising companies. As one might suspect, Chen’s film has accordingly been critiqued as little more than a window display for all the commodities and super signs deemed necessary for living out the modern Chinese Dream (see e.g. Li 2015; Woodland 2018). In point of fact, prominent branded products peppered throughout the film include, but are not limited to, Apple products (including iPhones, MacBook, iMac), Renault cars, Five Plus clothes, 3D gold jewellery, Costa coffee and various makes of expensive alcohol (including Great Wall red wine and Ballantine’s Scotch Whisky). Again speaking to our fractal diagram, Li Wei reports that the Shanghai Film Festival accordingly celebrated I Know Women’s Hearts as “the most successful” at integrating product placements into its narrative framework (2015, p. 38). Aware of such criticism, Chen has since protested that his film’s cluttered commercial mise-en-scène actually formulates a satirical take on the convergence of Chinese and American consumerist cultures and lifestyles. Critics like Sarah Woodland are not convinced, though, noting how the Huallywood film derives so little humour from these placements that “[i]t seems that rather than satirizing consumerism as an ideology the film is actually just a vehicle for promoting consumerism” (2018, p.  44).4 For our purposes here, what becomes most pertinent about the lifestyle

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products littering this and other commercial Chinese films is how they become “directly linked to expressions of gender and family in ways which create associations between femininity, masculinity, family, success, love and consumption” (2018, pp. 43–4). Ideas also present Design for Living (a Hong Kong-PRC co-production), which is a high-concept musicalcum-rom com set inside the fictional Jones & Sunn financial company’s skyscraper. Within the main melody narrative of Design for Living, the mega corporation is about to go public, with its Chairman Ho Chung-ping (Chow Yun-fat) promising his CEO Winnie Cheung (Sylvia Chang)—also his long-time mistress—that she can finally become a major shareholder (something she has previously been excluded from). This melodic narrative also tracks the interlacing stories of Lee Seung (Wang Ziyi) and Kat (Yueting Lang), two junior hires who bring their own aspirational dreams of success to the company. Throughout the film, the wealthy and successful partners who inhabit the exclusive upper floors are glimpsed by their aspiring underlings as they board the building’s express elevators. Here, the rich and successful flaunt their expensive lifestyle commodities and super signs (such as watches, suits and gadgets), which the young employees fetishistically desire and aspire to. Of especial relevance to our analysis of the Ningbo showrooms below, and to our later study of multi-storey development projects in the same city (Chap. 6), Olivia Khoo (2019) exposes how the film’s “expressionistic mise-en-scène of hyper capitalism” literally maps notions of success, wealth and happiness onto a vertical aesthetic, whereby to succeed is to literally become upwardly mobile in a high-rise world of urban finance. At its crudest, notions of lifestyle politics peddled by such cinematic clichés betray the idea that the products one owns and the types of services (or signs) one can consume/flaunt essentially define what sort of person one (and others think one) is. However, as David B. Clarke points out, the very notion of “lifestyle” should itself be interrogated as an ideological artefact, which in the last analysis only makes sense through, or presupposes, the operations of a consumer society logic (2003, p. 131). Awareness of such structures and tropes ultimately reveal the ideological message of these, and other commercial aspirational Chinese films, to be a form of “message-consumption message” (see e.g. Baudrillard 1998, p.  121). Which is to say, the ultimate meaning of these commercial Huallywood rom coms is not so much to be located in the narrative content of the romantic story but rather in “the new modes of relating and perceiving”

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they impose, as well as “the alterations to traditional family and group structures” they project (1998, p. 121). Or, stated differently, concepts of having a lifestyle always already implicate the pertaining conditions of consumer politics, which invariably gravitate around the tyranny of choice and fashion (one cannot choose not to choose and remain within the dominant cultural system) and the imperative or injunction to “Enjoy!” By making themselves appear individual or particular to themselves through the purchasing and projection of a unique or desirable lifestyle (defined as a tyrannical system of fashions, objects and signs), consumer subjects (both within and beyond the screen) reveal a form of conformity with the dominant (and dominating) ideological codes (Ritzer 1998 and Baudrillard 1998, p.  24ff). For both Baudrillard and Ritzer, this means that there is little place for individual goals within a consumer society system, because there is essentially only room for the goals and desires of the system. With this in mind, looking horizontally to the culture that produces films like I Know Women’s Hearts and Design for Living (as Khoo also does) reveals these products to be consistent with a broader ideological zeitgeist and drive to normalise consumer lifestyle politics: in these instances in a bid to stall the slowing of the Chinese economy. In what follows, we argue that glancing sideways from the cinema into the city reveals the same logic also pertaining for contemporaneous examples of urban shi-nema, not least because, like the culture industry products of Huallywood, these glitzy arrangements (and the real estate products they peddle) mobilise “powerful economic forces” at the same time as they set up a series of needs and desires that benefit the wider nation state (p. 60). But before getting to these, it is incumbent upon us to reiterate that if it is female demographics that are encouraged to desire and consume goods/signs in and through aspirational Huallywood products, Chinese women often remain systemically excluded from substantial forms of wealth accumulation projected and afforded by aspirational shi-nema. For, if rich men aid women in getting the goods or corporate shares their hearts (were made to) desire in films like I Know Women’s Hearts and Design for Living, in the world beyond the screen, there remains an insurmountable gender (and sexuality) bias built into the Chinese real estate system, which actively discourages women from (desiring or) buying property and thus sharing in this ballooning area of domestic wealth. It is to this system that we now turn before diving into our exceptional case study that focuses on a less well-documented example of a female real estate shopper in China.

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Real (Estate) Aspirations and the Gendered Properties of Property Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari’s modelling of state apparatuses and state space serves to animate the social diagram in ways quite different to traditional social science models, and can help us to here describe how a gendered bias becomes encoded into our fractal picture. Indeed, for Deleuze and Guattari the state is first and foremost an apparatus whose power derives from its ability to capture and overcode various territories and flows (of wealth, goods, bodies, machines, signs and subjects). Modern capitalism historically served to reinvigorate existing models of the state, they maintain, allowing it to transmutate into an all-encompassing form of despotic “megamachine” (2004, p. 508). For Deleuze and Guattari, the forces of capitalism also increasingly became coextensive with striated institutional structures and processes, helping to support and normalise its despotic systems of signification, while radically silencing the enslaved and subjugated subjects (whether they be individual subjects or a group subject such as “women”). Under such conditions, new-fangled processes of “machinic enslavement” and “social subjugation” came into operation (2004, pp. 506–8). Of relevance to our gendered framing of the modern Chinese consumer culture below, Anna Hickey-Moody clarifies how, in the US social system at least: Practices of overcoding impose meanings arising from despotic signification on to the various processes through which social life and desire operate. In contrast to the libidinal, or foundational and psychic overcoding which occurs through capitalism, states often overcode through policy and rhetoric rather than capitalism’s preferred tools of desire and affect. (2019, p. 5)

Today, similar practices are used to overcode and axiomatise gender inequality within the Chinese megamachine (read fractal picture). These are achieved through a double pincer movement of state-sponsored media (such as aspirational cinema and televised dating shows) and state policy and rhetoric, especially with regard to women’s financial independence and real estate acquisition. For example, a gendered structural inequality associated with China’s real estate market and wealth has recently been linked to the (overcoded) ideological myth/sign promoted and promulgated by the Chinese media since around 2007–2008: this being the phenomenon of the so-called “leftover” woman. As Fincher writes, this label—often defined

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as a single woman over the age of twenty-seven—became a potent concept or “category of women concocted by the government to achieve its demographic goals of promoting marriage, planning population, and maintaining social stability” (Fincher 2014, p.  6). Through this personage, the Chinese state—in coordination with the Women’s Federation, state-run media companies, property developers and the “matchmaking industry”— worked to increase demand and manufacture new desires among university graduates of the post-1980 and post-1990 generation for real estate ownership. A key part of this was achieved by generating an atmosphere of stigma and shame associated with the so-called “naked marriage,” or getting hitched before owning a home (Fincher 2014, p. 98). Speaking to other state-sanctioned cultural myths circulated and promulgated by multiple media organisations, the ownership of property (private capital) increasingly became perceived as a means by which a Chinese male could become endowed with something like a right to a wife and heir (a libidinal desire articulated to retrograde patriarchal structure). Thereafter his wife, as a special form of commodified body in (what we might call after Baudrillard) the Chinese “system of objects,” would (along with her family) become responsible for filling, furnishing and styling the house with all the other objects required for their lifestyle dream (a kind of unofficial dowry system). Or again, and key to what follows, the new home quickly becomes a supercharged object-sign that transforms the male owner into a form of attractor, which in future chapters we will discuss pulling in a further calculus of object, (super) signs and bodies.5 Worth noting here is how the ownership of urban property meets and codetermines modern aspects of Chinese identity and subjectivity, with what we might here call the properties of property serving to positively alter what a (predominantly male) body can do in the sense that the ownership of property literally transforms the capacities  and prospects (read  desirability) of that body.6 Bearing this overcoding of bodies in mind, Fincher notes in passing that around 2008, “local population planning commissions in cities such as Nanjing and Ningbo” began carrying out strategic “‘interventions’ to resolve the perceived ‘crisis’ of growing numbers of women remaining single” (2014, p. 30). In the picture sketched above (and in the previous chapter) we might perceive how the Chinese state not only helps manipulate the needs and desire of individuals in a manner designed to buoy the national economy but in turn also ensures that the ownership of this wealth buttresses the pertaining heteronormative patriarchal order—here

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by literally concretising large-scale structures that ensure the endurance and amplification of existing wealth, gender and sexualised ideologies/ inequalities. It is in the wake of these social and urban engineering endeavours that we now dive into our first shi-nematic case study.

China Moulds Hearts and Designs Cities for Living Bearing our brief survey of commercial Chinese cinema in mind, we now want to turn to our first example of Chinese urban shi-nema, which in a comparable ideological manner overcodes a whole calculus of objects and signs (including a raft of models, life-sized sets, images and glamorous branded products) that conspire to generate an atmosphere pregnant with virtual lifestyle images associated with an as yet unbuilt apartment complex (what we have playfully called (un)real estate; Fleming & Harrison 2018). These agential collections provide the framework or ecology for the sudden intensive flow of desire, whose energies, like that of lightning before a strike (or flowing earthing), exist in a distributed, charged and latent form within the larger desiring assemblage (the larger fractal picture of the Second Coming of Capitalism, or semiocapitalism, to China). Following Deleuze and Guattari, it remains important to bear in mind that the virtual is always far richer and contains greater potentials than anything that is actual or actualised (see e.g. 2011, p 156). Which is to say, the virtual always exceeds and sublimates that which is actual.7 Consider then Fig. 3.1, taken on X’s camera-phone upon arriving at a showroom named Ningbo Bay City—a relatively expensive property development given its location along a river bank and near to the city’s train station. It captures a specific arrangement of bodies, costumes, commodities and objects strategically arranged upon a Ningbo street corner to attract and greet potential buyers as they approach the salesroom for the compound apartments. The luxury lifestyle association articulated to the pleasure craft, the Porsche, the Rolls Royce, in combination with the Western female models dressed in elegant evening gowns, provides viewers with several glamorous objects and subject-objects whose unattainable attainability resonates with the heuristic commodity fetishism and aspirational desires already propagandistically set out in Chinese Dream lifestyle films such as I Know Women’s Hearts and Design for Living. It is also worth recalling here that the word glamour itself derives from old Scots, where it traces connections to witchcraft, with “casting the glamour” over one’s eyes being associated

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Fig. 3.1  Approach to the salesroom

with pitching visual enchantments and spell binding (“deceptio visus” see e.g. Dictionar o the Scots Leid/Dictionary of Scots Language).8 Such ideas clearly resonate with Nigel Thrift’s observation that “glamour is selling. It is manipulation. It is seduction. It is a certain form of deception. But it is something more too. It is meticulous selection and control” (2010, pp. 297–8, emphasis ours). The apparent emphasis on bewitching illusion bound up with glamour for the purposes of manipulation and control helps us articulate these urban arrangement (of objects, super signs, actors and surfaces) with the aforementioned Chinese principles of shi. In this specific case, we can see the attention-grabbing optical arrangements as being cast out upon the Ningbo streets to generate a series of virtual associations and ideological imaginings in keeping with the operations of the Chinese Dream and more distributed aspirational desires. On the opposite side of the showroom entrance we find different but thematically related arrangements displayed on a forecourt, which utilise sand, a make-shift mural portraying a cresting ocean scene, surf boards,

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sun loungers and the smells/tastes of a real BBQ to greet potential buyers with yet more lifestyle associations, as coherent with the Jet Set Harbour but importantly providing visitors with new and evolving sensorimotor experiences (Fig. 3.2). In both inter-connected arrangements we also find props, materials and other to-be-phenomenally-experienced objects being strategically arranged in a way that evokes the principles of cinematic mise-­ en-­scène and window dressing, in order to generate virtual images of an elsewhere or hyperreal fantasy associated with the dual harbour/beach front that constitutes the unique selling point for this particular complex.9 Take, for example, the incidental background costumes, such as the carte bleu chef operating the grill, the waiting staff in tailored waistcoats and the uniformed security guard replete with white gloves (to protect the merchandise), which resonate with the same costume signs that litter the mise-­ en-­scène of aspirational Huallywood rom coms such as Feng’s Fei cheng wu

Fig. 3.2  Secluded beach set-up with private BBQ grill manned by carte bleu chef

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rao/If You Are the One 2 (2010) set inside high-end international hotels and corporate venues. Customers here exit the street and move towards the showroom space along a wooden deck, which guides them past the aforementioned scenes onto the sand, via the BBQ grill. In addition to being jarred by the contrived optics while guided by the predetermined path, we can attest from our own experience that here customers experience a form of “passive touch”—embodied cognitive processing driven by different textures coming into contact with the body (Ackerman, Nocera, & Bargh 2010, p.  1714): in this case occasioned by traversing the boardwalk and then loose sand, which demand a series of changes in sensory feedback and neuromuscular activity. The resulting embodied experience potentially reinforces associations with non-urban spaces and virtual settings coherent with the Jet Set Harbour and a secluded beach scene. As the visitors thereafter pass by the operational BBQ, further changes in bodily states are stimulated by the olfactory particles sizzling off the smoky grilled meats. To again dip into the cognitive science literature, Barsalou (2008) has offered neuroimaging evidence of such phenomena, reporting how gustatory and olfactory areas of the brain and body become triggered by food smells (p.  627). To extend our own metaphor, the stimulation of such brain areas is also designed to ramp up the biological human’s subjective desires to begin consuming. As customers have also been offered opportunities to taste, and begin eating, we can perhaps also map a series of ways in which inner bodily states and chemico-sensations are transformed in turn by the metabolisation of food matter. Another image captured by X shows how customers then pass onto a red carpet, which leads into a polished marble welcoming foyer, where a quartet of women adorned in floor length formal gowns perform classical Western music on string and wind instruments in front of an upsurge of exotic perfumed flowers (Fig. 3.3). Here again, the affective and communicative principles of theatre and cinema are detoured10 and deployed to help generate an ambient mood and tangible atmosphere of luxuriousness. One detail worth lingering on here is this showroom’s preference for playing Western classical music, which as Mark Brownrigg notes, generally operates on a different system of scales to Chinese music, with its organisational substratum deriving alternative “rules of diatonic harmony that follow on from them” (2007, p. 311), for traditional Chinese music has historically employed “an anhemitonic pentatonic (five note) scale,”

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Fig. 3.3  Welcome foyer of salesroom

meaning that “the Oriental sense of harmony is distinctively different from the Occidental one” (2007, p. 311). On entering into these sonorous Western soundscapes we might also detect music being deployed as a symbolic and architectonic machine or “acoustic space” (Elsaesser and Hagener 2009, pp.  129–130; see also Deleuze and Guattari 2004, p.  335–343) used to provoke “imaginative travel” (de la Fuente et  al. 2012, p. 43). This vibrational sound environment becomes intermodally articulated to, and intermingled with, other olfactory and associative domains, as visitors have here entered into a pungent floral atmosphere, quite different to the smoky BBQ aromas billowing outside. Thereafter, as one transitions from the urban environment into the sales room, ever more affective shi-nematic arrangements begin to nudge the visitor’s associations towards a fantasy context of luxurious lifestyles, beautiful people, glamorous possessions (handbags, diamonds, iPhones, etc.) that gravitate around the purely virtual target (a lifestyle apartment). As if channelling the cinema, this transition first entails providing visitors with a quasi-establishing shot, or a “long-shot” as the apartment complex is represented in miniature within the confines of the showroom. Figure 3.4 captures how this is realised through the use of a scaled maquette of the grounds, which illustrates the spatial organisation of the complex-to-be, framed before a wall map which offers customers a shift in perspective,

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Fig. 3.4  Maquette and wall map perspectives

specifically a bird’s-eye view of the complex’s location in relation to the wider urban context. Prefaced by a collage of gold plaques documenting government approval, both media carefully select which aspects of the city to show and screen out (include/exclude) from the portrayal, and by

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aesthetically intensifying and exaggerating colours and spaces, they emphasise the unique and exclusive apartments on sale. Exploring the affect and functions of other miniature models within Chinese culture more broadly, Ann Anagnost  demonstrates how their diminutiveness “does not correspond to a ‘reduction of significance’ but is rather emblematic, a container well suited to ‘aphoristic and didactic thought’” (1997, p. 161). In highly coded socio-political spaces such as this, the miniature model is often also used to endow visitors with a form of “transcendental perspective akin to what Benedict Anderson calls the ‘bird’s-eye-view’ of modern mapmaking” (Anagnost 1997, p.  162). A return to Fig. 3.4 divulges an intensification of these principles, as the shi-­ nematic ensemble appears to montage together these two different forms of the fly over into one shot. Of further relevance here, Anagnost also shows how the strategic scale-shift grants the model an effective object-nature, lending to it a sense of distance, as if viewed from a long way off, a distance essential to the “objective” gaze of the viewer, that curious “combination of detachment and close attentiveness.” In this sense, then, its diminutiveness installs a similar effect to the glass panes that separate viewers from commodities on display, “endowing goods with the distance that is the source of their objectness.” (1997, pp. 165–6)

It is interesting to note how certain miniature models arranged within the showrooms we visited employ both diminutiveness and glass casings to doubly distance and objectify that which is displayed/viewed, whilst also using LED light displays, spotlighting and laser beams to reveal, intend or suggest ways in which the model can be viewed. Such discussions thus conjure a long history of cultural and cinematic critics—including the poet Charles Baudelaire, the formalist filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the flâneur Walter Benjamin as well as Guilianna Bruno, Anne Friedberg and Jonathan Beller—who foreground the historical role windows and shopfronts played in moulding and anticipating emerging cinematic modes of attention grabbing, viewing and desiring (see e.g. Bruno 2002, pp. 59–60; Friedberg 1993, p. 5). Emblematic here are the views of Paul Verilio, who explains how it “was just a short step through that venerable urban invention, the shop window” to the “CINECITTA and the TELECITTA, bustling with absent televiewers” (1994, p. 65). Beyond simply offering viewers a full sweep of the absent or the as yet unreal-ised real estate complex to be, these prescribed and pre-formulated

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forms of looking produce affective potentialities for action, because the “mode of display that reveals while it veils and withholds is one that manufactures desire” (Anagnost 1997, 165–6). One thinks here of the double meaning of the word screen in English, which can be both a barrier or partition used to screen out people’s vision and a frame used to project images to be seen, as per the cinema. In both senses of this word, these shi-nematic apparatuses work to screen the (un)real estate for potential buyers. The effective shi-nematic arrangements observed at Ningbo Bay City were replicated in several other showrooms that we visited as X explored further options for purchasing an apartment in different parts of the city. In addition to similar principles being put to work, the pictures we collected reveal how each showroom screened different forms of cinematicity courtesy of their mise-en-scène, with “genre” clusters determining the name of the complex where potential customers could live, the style of cityscape they would inhabit, and also by association the characteristics of the lifestyle their new purchase would purportedly allow them to achieve. An apartment complex called Bali Sunday, for example, used the showroom to develop a Southeast Asian theme to generate an atmosphere of travel, adventure, relaxation and exotic/erotic island living. Inside the showroom, dark wood panels and beams on the walls were combined with soft furnishings such as ornamented nooks, round-cage chandeliers with dimly lit candle lanterns and curtained doorways ornate with wooden carvings (Fig. 3.5). This interplay suggests that the developers were aiming to create a culturally rich, relaxed yet sufficiently sophisticated Balinese atmosphere as the consumable backdrop against which the high-stakes (and often emotionally fraught) discussions and interactions could take place  (replete with pink cherry blossom, red lanterns, and decorative knotting which introduce familiar symbols into the potentially unfamiliar setting). As potential buyers or the merely curious venture further into the set­up, the developer typically requires customers to engage and interact with an ever-growing number of transmedia objects and affects. These in turn require customers to synaesthesially engage with the materiality of the apartments and its complex, or in enactive cognition terms, to begin gearing into the action/perception loops enabled by the virtual constellation of images and other sensorimotor experiences afforded by the setting. Across these various instances, and as we will further discover by studying other media below, an ever-growing range of agential bodies, images, glossy brochures, luxury objects, maps, models, videos, diagrams, dioramas, sounds and interactive media (including 3D virtual tours and a

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Fig. 3.5  The Southeast Asian decoration at Bali Sunday

competitive pricing wall) became transactionally mobilised and unleashed in order to encourage visitors to begin desiring and (re)acting in a predetermined, embodied fashion. To take but one example here, after her visit to the showroom, the developers sent a promotional video to X’s WeChat account to further augment the aforementioned Southeast Asian theme.

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The developers now exploited digital media and hand-held devices to move beyond the physical and temporal constraints of the showroom and fully elaborate on several themes by adding sounds, depth and close-up details. Whilst the smartphone format and palm-sized screen increased the sense in which Bali Sunday was a world within grasp, already in one sense owned or at least ownable by the customer, this video advertisement worked in two seemingly contrasting and yet complementary ways. Its mise-en-scène worked to extract the apartment complex from the Chinese city and place it in a tropical Southeast Asian setting—replete with waterfalls, dense forests and wildlife—while the informational content concomitantly emphasised the immaculate infrastructure of the actual surrounding urban space, specifically highlighting its proximity to a yet-to-be-built primary school with places reserved for future home-owners’ children, a new hospital similarly under construction, and one of the city’s newest shopping malls. Figure 3.6 constitutes a series of framegrabs taken from the promotional video. Starting with top left and moving clockwise, future homeowners are first shown a schematic plan of their neighbourhood. The first image shows how this plan is an infomatic11 grid overlaid with pulsating hotspots to indicate the proximity of important landmarks and to highlight the grounds’ convenient location, while criss-crossing lights flash along the surrounding streets to exaggerate unhindered silent traffic flow

Fig. 3.6  Promotional video sent to social media accounts

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on the typically congested streets. Moving right, the second image zooms into the apartment grounds, where the scene turns to lush greenery underneath a dense canopy of trees as rays of light penetrate from a blue sky above. As the viewer is led deeper into these grounds, an otherworldly soundscape overlays the gushing sounds of fountains that spurt forth water into deep pools festooned with large violet lilies and edged with cobbled paths and wooden bridges that lead to further tropical gazebos. All the while, these images are offset with the non-diegetic sounds of European folk-chanson.12 Although this connotes less with Southeast Asian themes, it enfolds positive associations with the soundscapes of China’s mega shopping malls: a local version of which heavily features in the promotional video. The third image (bottom right) shows how this mall is fully integrated to serve as an appendix to the apartment complex (see Chap. 6), replete with all the desirable high-end European and American brand names and super signs that give it the international, middle-­ class associations that lifestyle customers apparently strive for, including Hermes and Givenchy, but also the more affordable H&M. This hyperreal favouring of Western soundscapes and branded screenscapes can be seen as a material expression of Chinese consumers’ statistical preference for signs and  clothing brands with a perceived Western origin. Indeed, many studies link this to a form of status consumption whereby “prestigious-symbolic” fashion and clothing brands associated with the West are felt to communicate wealth and status better than their Asian equivalents (see e.g. O’Cass and Siahtiri 2013). Tellingly, like much aspirational commercial cinema, the promotional video ends with an embodied and affective intercorporeal coupling, in this case featuring a romantic scene of a young stylish heteronormative couple holding hands towards a beach front as the sun sets—presumably somewhere in Southeast Asia (fourth image, bottom left).13 Such analyses help illuminate further shi-nematic principles being unleashed within a single component of the larger assemblage (revisited in Chap. 6) to generate positive associations, while images collected from our participant’s visit to a third complex provided further insight into how the actual apartments were being modelled and constructed as part of a larger affective matrix. Here, we can take a final glimpse inside a showroom machine from a development called Family Time as an illustrative case in point. For, as was common, this showroom came replete with various embedded full-scale model apartments, which buyers arrived at only after being taken through the various other stages of the showroom. In

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the linear progressive journey towards these immersive or inhabitable spaces, we can again detect links to the earlier forms of efficacy Jullien detected in Chinese landscape art. For while the latter were typically created upon scrolls, Jullien points to how viewers are forced into a progressively unfolding experience, wherein at “each stage and even in the most minute details of the depiction” there lies an “alternation of opening and closing [that] imparts a vital rhythm” (1995, p. 138, emphasis in original). Jean Hillier and Kang Cao link these artistic principles to Chinese urban planning and manipulation more generally, which increasingly strive to make events “unfold progressively, like a scroll,” so that “an experience is lived through” in a way that can be probabilistically programmed for in advance (Hillier and Cao 2013, p. 393). By comparable means, we might also attune ourselves to unfolding psycho-social principles that appear to be strategically arranged in a manner that is not too dissimilar from the spatial organisation of an incorporating architectural assemblage like IKEA, which “aims to induce [buyers] to feel part of a whole evolutionary process” often referred to as “experiential shopping” (Potente and Salvini 2009) or “sensorimotor shopping” (Harrison and Fleming 2019). No doubt, like an IKEA showroom, potential real estate buyers in China are calculatingly steered through a range of “inspirational displays” that unfold “fresh ideas with product combinations, contemporary interior design suggestions” that are designed to present participants with “a strong emotional experience” (Potente and Salvini 2009) or a “pre-personal affordance space” (Harrison and Fleming 2019; Gallagher 2017). Similar to a film reel or a landscape scroll, the spatio-visual path through an IKEA ensemble is also largely  predetermined and temporally mapped out in advance. As Ritson et  al. (1996) remind us, as customers move through these commercial set-ups, various consumer goods operate as important and potent “commodity signs” (à la Baudrillard) through which the buyers understand and construct their lives (real and imaginary). Like the real estate showrooms, then, certain scenes loaded with influential semiotic meanings and potent affects are arranged in ways that derive their primary meaning from culturally determined consumption-based activity, and thus “form an important existential source of meaning in the individual’s construction of their subjective view of reality” (Lyddon & Alford in Ritson et al. 1996). And as we will shortly discover, the Chinese showrooms array a range of charged objects and images that intend to synaptically trigger a series of predictable reactions or emotional responses in a range of other remote-controlled actors.

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What becomes most striking about these particular shi-nematic openings and closings, then, are the specific cultural associations that the developers attempted to trigger and mobilise as visitors passed through. While the other two showrooms we discussed sought to extract potential buyers from China by setting up otherworldly fantasies, the Family Time set-up tried to impress on its visitors some of the expectations and social stresses associated with the latest forms of Chinese Dream and, by so doing, amplify certain acculturated forms of gender-specific pressure that were particularly conducive to buying/selling the apartments. Figure 3.7 compiles images captured on the smartphone of our participant during a visit to this complex. In it we can see how a wedding suite mise-en-scène is arranged and deployed in the office, bedroom and bathroom sets to help leverage the purchase of an apartment, recalling the above socio-political norms which suggest that only men with apartments will be considered eligible bachelors (see e.g. Fincher 2014, p. 52ff). In these film-like sets we thus  pick up how an economy of affective signs is also at play, with multiple semiotic signifiers seemingly intending to impress certain feelings and emotion into the bodies circulating among them. From a male buyer perspective (or the family of the male, who were often in tow), the implicit suggestion being put into circulation is that buying the apartment will probabilistically lead to the owner finding a wife, and heir, and thus contributing to the happiness or pride of the family after fulfilling the “traditional” (read retrograde) patrilineal imperative to marry and reproduce (Fincher 2014, p. 98).14 Following thinkers like Sarah Ahmed we might thus discern emotions being put to work as another form of affective capital within these pregnant shi-nematic spaces, with a chain of affects being

Fig. 3.7  Salesroom with wedding suite mise-en-scène

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put into circulation by the objects and signs with the hope of making, shaping or sticking to the bodies (and brains) of targeted visitors (Ahmed 2013, p. 4ff). In such manner, these hyperreal film set-like spaces offer us interesting variants on certain experiential IKEA shopping principles, not least by interweaving powerful Chinese passions and affective cultural forces into the shi-nematic mise-en-scène for maximum effect (related to the landscape of the unfolding Chinese life journey). As indicated, by so doing the showroom spaces work to remotely control, trigger, activate or involve other key players and pressures in these unfolding scenarios, over and above the (implanted) desires of the potential purchasers. Certainly, for X, additional pressures linked to these narratives came not only from the real estate agents but also from members of her immediate family and social entourage (who would accompany her on the showroom visits). Her report of a family dinner reveals how the imminent property purchase quickly became a leverage point to solicit a marriage commitment and urge the arrival of offspring. When she initially misconstrued a relative’s request “那下一步 呢” (“and the next step?”) as concerning down payments on the apartment, official documents were produced on a cell phone to emphasise the illegality of non-matrimonial co-habitation. Following this episode, a different relative enquired about the availability of apartments in the same development for her son, a cousin of our participant (Fincher notes how families will often pool money so that male cousins rather than daughters can purchase real estate). Thereby, not only was the relative conflating her son’s university graduation with the official end of his bachelordom but also introduced the welfare of her future grandchildren as becoming contingent on our participant’s decision to invest in this property (and, as would be required to save face of everybody involved, quickly get married). In recognising this interplay of staging and content with unfolding narrativisation, we necessarily need now to move on to consider how an even broader range of sociomaterial forces and external politico-economic manipulations likewise became effectively embroiled in this story of buying an apartment.

Staging (Trans)actions: Or, Actualising the Dream So far we have explored the spatial layouts and visual logic of several showrooms in Ningbo. And we have sought to contextualise our descriptions with insights offered by X during the conversations that we recorded. But

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we are yet to see what socio-political practices unfold within these material settings and how their logic can also be explained based on a broader network of social, cultural, political, economic and ideological factors. From our data, it is clear that people engaging with the apartment-buying process become part of a flowing narrative that begins to sweep them up and then increasingly unfold before them. In working to join this narrative together with the changing behaviours and actions of our participant, we might turn to some recent applications of Actor Network Theory (ANT; Latour 2005). Following education researchers Fenwick and Edwards (2011), for instance, will help us theorise how the operational logic and distributed agency of more-than-human “sociomaterial” assemblages spread out in a complex “web of relations” that thereafter mobilise or inculcate certain narrative “patterns of possibility,” as human actors become incorporated (with)in an ever-growing “network of texts, technologies, artefacts, and architectures” that must be understood “interpenetrating human values, ideas, and interactions” (pp.  714–25). While Fenwick and Edwards’ concern lay with education initiatives in the US school system, the particular value of such modes of analysis to us is that they allow us to trace the politics of negotiation that occur at each node where one thing becomes hooked to and even changed by another (or resists, or pretends, or partially links, or links only if other associations remain in place) and then to another, and so on, to form an assemblage that moves. Such analysis reveals the weak nodes, the vulnerable points, and where and how certain points become central passageways for activity. (p. 712)

In these real estate showrooms, certain dramatic stories and actions increasingly become staged or activated by a shi-nematic (or shi-nemANTic!) configuration that is set up across time and space in such a way as to hasten the emergence of a structural milieu that requires appropriate “changes in behaviour” and action (p.  712). Or stated differently: a narrative. Let us recall that in its simplest and most crude form, the narrative schema common to most commercial film—putting to one side complications that may be introduced via flash backs, flash forwards, unreliable narrators and so on—typically involve a movement from equilibrium to disequilibrium to a new form of equilibrium. The most common template or structure, as David Bordwell puts it, thus looks something like:

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“introduction of setting and characters–explanation of a state of affairs– complicating action–ensuing events–outcome–ending” (Bordwell 1997, p. 34). For Deleuze, such movements become emblematic of what he calls action-­image cinema, which at their most basic trace a movement from an opening situation (S), through the intermediary of an action (A), towards an altered or transformed situation (Ś): SAŚ. Importantly, the action itself, as Deleuze describes it, can be thought of as a form of duel: “a duel of forces, a series of duels: duel with the milieu, with the others, with itself” (Deleuze 2005, p. 146). He also takes care to draw our attention to the powers and forces put into play by the embedding space that any given narrative temporally unfolds within. That is to say, attention is drawn to the importance of space and setting, particularly  by paying attention to how certain “derived milieu assert their independence and start to become valid for themselves.” Accordingly, Deleuze describes how a  milieu and its forces incurve on themselves, they act on the character, throw him [sic] a challenge, and constitute a situation in which he is caught. […] He must acquire a new mode of being (habitus) or raise his mode of being to the demands of the milieu and of the situation. Everything is individuated: the milieu as a particular space-time, the situation as determining and determinate, the collective as well as the individual character. (2005, p. 146)

This incurving of milieu into an individuated-actor-network—“a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (Latour 2005, p. 7)—is also a principle we can relate to the dynamic and dramatic processes we discovered visitors to the showroom being subjected to. To explain how, we now return to our documenting of X as she interacted with these set-ups, while accompanying this with some of the first-hand subjective reactions that we solicited through observations, recorded conversations and semi-structured interviews. Our mixed-method analysis is itself a necessary consequence of dealing with these more-than-human “messy objects,” which demanded our engagement with an expanded cast of actors and (real estate and non-human) agents that collectively conspired to enwrap a quasi-action-image narrative trajectory or framework around X’s unfolding experiences. These include a range of intense and emotional experiences and crisis moments arriving courtesy of family members, other buyers, owners, developers and a whole host of non-­ human actors and intensive agents such as a “Bidding Queue/Cue,” and rapidly evolving “Price Wall.” After all these actors and factors became

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involved, passing through and becoming part of the actor network led to X committing to an apartment, signing a contract, laying down a substantial monetary deposit, and later getting married to her male partner (the happy ending S´).

SAS´ in the City As a starting point for these considerations of an action image shi-nematic drama, we might presently flash back to what we can retroactively understand as a form of opening situation (S): a morning meeting point with estate agents and other potential buyers. Although X received a personalised phone call inviting her for a day’s viewing, the meeting point turned out to be a large impersonal hall in which a crowd jostled for position in lines leading off to different coaches, each person being subsequently branded with stickers to determine which company he or she belonged to for the day. Upon arrival at the site, customers were initially marshalled for a group photo opportunity in front of the complex. Suddenly, a large red banner is unfurled with the tour operator’s logo emblazoned upon it in bold yellow characters, before the act of framing and photographing the group serves to forge the disparate band of strangers into a proto-­ community or subject(ed) group. At the same time, however, the photographed sight of the group on site provides the real estate company with a free promotional shot. The complicit bodies of the framed (potential trans)actors are used to implicitly connote their endorsement of the company, and thereafter re-mediated and repurposed to serve as an affective or agential semiocapitalist image that immediately begins circulating on social media, feeding into the on-going promotion of the apartments and contributing to the pressure upon other would-be buyers to join in, or risk losing out. From consideration of one mediated image we might now jump to some others, namely a video recording of X as she and other customers began to venture into the complex. In this we see how the path from the coach to the showroom is lined with large trees, freshly planted for the occasion and dressed in fake cherry blossom. While these work to create an ambient kongqi/atmosphere they also serve to screen out the construction site that is just visible in the scene’s background, the rusty scaffolding and green safety netting cocoon so emblematic of urban China in this period of transformation. Within the recorded video, the ambient visual atmosphere of the cherry blossoms is audibly perturbed by the disruptive

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loud speakers which relay a combination of “Gregorian chants with contemporary electronic…arrangements,” and whose aural intensity evokes a different form of xuanxiang/suspension-imagination, more commonly associated with moments of competition and battle (again returning us to the Chinese origins of shi).15 Upon entering the showroom, visitors are allocated an agent who then guides them around, and introduces them to, the technical details of various maquettes, wall maps, and miniaturised apartment displays (as per the other showrooms). Visitors are thereafter ushered towards the back of the showroom where a crowd is gathering to be involved in the first real-time evolving drama or duel. We can see how a series of oblong diagrams whose rows and columns contain numbers suddenly become visible, spread across the back wall of the showroom. Figure 3.8 presents a collage of shots of this assemblage, which constitutes what we refer to as a Price Wall—the oblongs represent the different tower blocks in the development, while the rows correspond to different floors of the building and the columns indicate different pricing options: whether middle or outside apartment, which direction it faces, combined with what kind of repayment plan might suit different customers (spread over ten, twenty or thirty years). The exclusivity of this price wall is instantiated by gold-plated stanchions with plush red velvet ropes that hold back the crowd now hustling to take snapshots on their smartphones, whilst also allowing privileged access to agents authorised to update the wall. The last shot of the collage (far right) captures the moment an agent gradually covers up apartments on the Price Wall with a red sticker announcing 己售ji shou “sold out,”

Fig. 3.8  Perspectives on the Price Wall

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adding a certain amount of pressure and urgency to the dynamically transforming situation. The suspense and drama created by the Price Wall was a precursor to the “Bidding Queue/Cue,” which instituted another form of action-­ image duel. Indeed, once an agent had helped a potential buyer identify a suitable apartment on the pricing wall, they could then serve to represent the said buyer in a bidding queue/cue. Therein, a line of agents formed behind a microphone stand, each waiting his or her turn to bid on behalf of their customer. Beyond rousing curiosity, this ludic competition sustains forces of suspense and waiting (time as enemy and dwindling competitive resource) as the pressures of time and financial competition mount. In the queue, the agents, who are on commission, likewise appear to compete against each other (in another form of horizontal duel). A video from X’s phone captures both the agitation of the agents and the anxiety of the customers (as they oscillate between the subject positions of active participant and helpless viewer). Coupled to this, the physical layout of the scene was likewise effectively configured such that the bidding queue/cue and the manager’s desk occupied the opposite poles of the showroom, thus occasioning bids to be made over a loud speaker system so that all the human actors assembled within were audibly enveloped within the unfolding narrative events. Human actors were also employed to compound and sonically amplify the affective resonance of the assemblage, not least when potential customers were notified of the sale of each apartment by a “spontaneous” and intense round of applause from all the real estate agents, who momentarily became affective sound machines, forming into a clapping collective, whose acclamation sounded the further reduction of the available resources and marked an associated increase in scarcity. The specific actor network here amply demonstrates how the participation of non-human actors and agents interpenetrates and becomes “infiltrated with human intensities (interest and desires, knowledge authorities, fear, and so on) in assemblies of the social” (Fenwick and Edwards 2011, p. 716). Or again, we might grasp how the agency of non-human things “matter, not as discrete and reified objects with properties, but as effects and dynamic materializing processes that cause them to emerge and act in indeterminate entanglements of local everyday practice” (Fenwick and Edwards 2011, p. 721). X did not commit to an apartment that day. She had however left her details with the company as part of the visiting experience and intimated a

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provisional interest in prime real estate near the top of the soon-to-be-­ built tower. And while these earlier narratives aimed to seduce our participant, as a potential deal began to actualise, contrasting forms of pressurised narratives began to emerge. Indeed, several days later the property developers sent another unsolicited piece of information directly to X’s personal WeChat account. This was an image containing a grid of squares, which appeared to correspond to all the different apartments in the two main tower blocks. A section of one of the tower blocks had been circled with green highlighter. This, she was informed by text, apparently ring-fenced a series of apartments from general sale by the manager, who had now decided he wanted to keep these particular apartments to resell later once the property prices rose. Somewhat predictably, the apparent dream apartment X had indicated as being of potential interest lay firmly within the circled area. However, she was also offered one last chance to salvage her dream buy: for luckily, or dramatically, there was to be one final meeting with the manager at 9 a.m. the very next day to confirm. In this narrative twist or development (introduction of disequilibrium via another duel with a threatening actor) the image of the circle serves to literally add a symbolic target into the image of the apartment-buying story and present the unfolding narrative situation within a pressurised temporal ring to negotiate, which together threaten to disrupt or derail the dream narrative if X does not respond with her own rapid reaction (read transaction). In this latest development we sense how some of the immediate actors associated with the shi-nematic assemblage directly manipulate the story to better drive forward an action-image duel (A) that threatens and hastens the occasion of a final transformed situation (S´): the tragic or happy ending. Only later did it also become apparent to us that a range of more distant actors and agents were subtly exerting other manipulating influences upon the unfolding action. Consider in this light the transcript below, wherein X explains some of the reasons why, with hindsight, she committed to this investment so quickly. Here, X explains how the (state-­ sponsored) national news she was exposed to at the time affirmed the need to purchase property quickly, because for a limited window of time the minimum requirement for a security deposit would be 10% lower, due to (the “big four” state-owned) bank interest rates being lower, and a one-­ time special deal for university graduates like her. Y: There was a lot of news from the government, they were saying stuff related to apartments, so right now buying an apartment just got […] rela-

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tively good. […] The down payment is now 20%. Before it used to be 30%. […] Also, the bank repayment plans are relatively cheap. […] For example, we need to pay a [government] fee. I’ve got a university diploma so I can use it, if the fee is 500,000 (RMB) I only need to pay 200,000.

These incentives are of course an overt form of state intervention, here designed to encourage collective consumption activities within the national territory that at once respond to and reinforce the state-mediated lifestyle norms. As the result of these incentives, in combination with family pressure, media messages (read cultural normalisations and overcodings generated through stigma, shame and a fear of losing out) and a desire to buy into the lifestyle certain luxury apartments promised, this story, like most commercial action-image cinema and Huallywood rom coms, concluded with a happy ending: X signing off the purchase contract (and agreeing to marriage). What is more, in the Chinese attention economy and mise-en-­ scène of this imagistic world, X’s purchase would not be complete without her sharing an image of the signed contract recorded on her smartphone with a local audience on her WeChat account, replete with the caption “ 今天是个好日子。所有的一切都是礼物” (Today is a good day, everything is a gift).

From Commercial Mainstream Shi-nema to In-dependent Art Shi-nema Having thus explored both urban and filmic realisations of overground mainstream shi-nema, we next wish to illustrate further dimensions of Ningbo’s contemporary cinematicity by turning away from overground or commercial shi-nema to focus instead on in-dependent art Shi-nema— courtesy of a study of Wang Shu’s Ningbo Historic Museum (2008) and Jia Zhangke’s Shanghai World Expo film Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew (2010)—two projects that stand out as state-sanctioned vehicles of Chinese “modernity” that all the same seem to introduce discordant images and sensations into the urban landscape that appear to interfere with, disrupt and deterritorialise the ideological main melody.

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Notes 1. Huallywood is a portmanteau that combines the prefix “Hua”—roughly meaning Chinese language or Chinese culture with the suffix “llywood” to evoke Hollywood. The term “Huallywood” is a self-adopted industrial and academic moniker used to describe various Chinese film industry manifestations and products. As critics and scholars often note, this label betrays Chinese cinemas’ global Hollywood aspirations (see e.g. Shao 2014; Fleming and Indelicato 2019; Fleming 2019). 2. It is fascinating to note in passing some of the plot and character details either gained or lost in the adaptation from the Hollywood film. The figure of Zigang’s father only appears in the Chinese film, for example, with this being a character whose own age and attitudes are used to contrast the more modern and urbane Zigang while highlighting some of the on-going changes reaped upon the traditional patriarchal family unit under China’s on-going reforms. 3. The same can also be said for television production companies. Indeed, the advertising slots purchased during the commercial breaks of the Chinese period drama series 延禧攻略 (yan xi gong lüe/Story of Yanxi Palace) employed the same actors, in their costumes and settings from the series and acting out familiar scenes, only to interrupt the latter to “go off script” and address the audience directly with a sales pitch, blurring distinctions between advertisement and film, products and props. 4. In finding textual support for such claims, she points to how various female characters’ notion of success is negotiated around commercial products and branded goods, while their ventriloquised inner voices appear “almost totally concerned with issues of consumption and the judgement of others based on material possessions,” while “female-oriented products [become narratively] associated with happiness and positive new beginnings” (Woodland 2018, p. 45). 5. Here, we might put Fincher’s work on the asymmetric distribution of real estate among the genders in China into dialogue with Baudrillard’s work on “the system of objects.” For, as Baudrillard has proposed, under a totalitarian consumer culture system the body itself increasingly became a ­particularly privileged object and sign within another series of objects and signs. Zigzagging back to Fincher we might recall that while the groom was encouraged to own or put the down payment on the house, the bride and her family were often tasked with furnishing and decorating the empty concrete shell or cell (which would often amount to the same financial cost of the down payment). 6. Fincher notes that although the family of the bride would often spend a similar amount of money furnishing the new home as that which is laid

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down by the groom (or his family), the wife would not appear on the property deeds and thus essentially be trapped in the marriage for financial reasons. 7. In the world of biology, for example, there is an abstract topological plane of mammalian body forms from which all existing mammals are actual expressions of, but can never collectively exhaust the richness and potentials of, the virtual plane from which they derive. In working to clarify why this would be, it helps to return to a pedagogical explanation offered by Slavoj Žižek in his essay “Deleuze’s Platonism: Ideas as Real” (2007), which anchors its discussion to artworks. Therein, Žižek describes a common enough experience of going to see a movie, which although somewhat disappointing we intuitively feel must be adapted from a better novel we have not read. However, on tracking down and reading the book, we are further disappointed to discover that this too is sub-standard and is not the quality we expected with regard to that which the film failed. As such, both actual artworks come together to somehow point beyond themselves to a third “purely virtual” artwork that is patently better but does not in fact exist (Žižek 2007). Here, two actual media forms help reveal the virtual and help us grasp how the virtual or that which inexists is richer and more populated than the actual. So while this chapter can be said to deal with that which we found inexisting in China—(un)real estate—we return to these spaces later in the book to see how the virtual and potential manifestations we describe below become actual, which occasions their deeper embedding within a shopping lifestyle mall (Chap. 6). 8. Thanks to Andrew Jarvis who reactivated this point during a paper delivered at the Film-Philosophy conference in 2017. 9. Incidentally, the showroom is located facing away from the actual river banks it proposes to inhabit, which have not yet been developed and still constitute mud flats in parts. 10. Our use of the term “detour” and “detoured” throughout this book derives from the notion of détournement, a critical and dialectical manoeuvre popularised by Guy Debord and the Letterist International, and later the Situationist International. Détournnement is a term often translated as “deflection,” “diversion,” “detour,” “hijack,” “misuse,” or “reroute” in English. In thesis 208 of Society of the Spectacle (1984), Debord argues that détournement must appear “‘in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any inherent or definitive certainty.”’ Elsewhere, in the 1956 essay “‘A Users Guide to Detournement”’ co-authored with Gil J. Wolman, the procedure is described it in terms of a “‘mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, [which supersede] the original elements”’ to produce a “‘synthetic organisation of greater efficacy”’ (1956, p. 15). Our use of the term

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“detour” throughout aims to evoke this sense of hijacking and deflecting original meaning. 11. The term “infomatics” is related to ‘informatics’ but more often than not associated with corporate displays and app design. The term “infomatics” often connotes visually stimulating and attractive ways of rendering and relaying information and data. 12. The background track to this promotional video is Carla Bruni’s Tout le monde from the album Quelqu’un m’a dit, which is a popular album from which songs have often been taken for advertising, and film. Somewhat ironically, the song is itself a critique of socialism: “This melancholy song tells of how everyone has known disappointment—forgotten childhood memories, remains of dreams (‘restes de rêves’), and devastation—and then absurdly suggests that this solitude should be fixed by passing a law— ‘Il faudrait que tout l’monde réclame auprès des autorités, / Une loi contre toute notre solitude,’ (‘Everyone should demand from the authorities / A law against all our solitude.’), musing on French socialism” (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quelqu%27un_m%27a_dit). 13. The island-style romance featured in this promotional video is not unlike the videos of “destination weddings” increasingly found circulating on Chinese social media platforms like Weiboa and WeChat (Zhuang and Everett 2018). 14. As noted, the Chinese government actively encourages only married (heterosexual) couples to buy apartments, with “government restrictions on buying property […] making it increasingly difficult for a single person— of any sexual orientation—to buy a home” (Fincher 2014, p.  89). The success of such interpretations can be supported here by a narrative that unfolded during an interview with X, wherein she described how the parents of one of her female friends will not acknowledge her boyfriend’s marriage proposal until he buys an apartment. 15. In this case, the track The Mass by Era, which is a “new-age music project” that “mixes Gregorian chants with contemporary electronic… arrangements,” with lyrics either in “pseudo-Latin or Latin,” apparently popular among some Mixed Martial Arts fans because it has been historically used as a walk-out track for top fighters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Era_ (musical_project)). So there is a link to battle or even competition and this to some extent is captured by the song’s Chinese translation into 闪电部队 在前进, i.e. shan dian bu dui zai qian jin, literally “lightning army in the past advanced” or perhaps “advance of the former lightning army”).

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References Ackerman, J. M., Nocera, C. C., & Bargh, J. A. (2010). Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decision. Science, 328, 1712–1715. Ahmed, S. (2013). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New  York and London: Routledge. Anagnost, A. (1997). National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Anders, C.  J. (2011, July 2). How Does the Chinese Remake of What Women Want Stack Up to the Original? i09. Retrieved from https://io9.gizmodo. com/how-does-the-chinese-remake-of-what-women-want-stack-up-5753489. Barsalou, L.  W. (2008). Grounded Cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59(Jan), 617–645. Baudrillard, J. (1998). The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage. Berry, C. (2009). Jia Zhangke and the Temporality of Postsocialist Chinese Cinema: In the Now (and Then). In O. Khoo & S. Metzger (Eds.), Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (pp. 111–128). Bristol: Intellect. Bordwell, D. (1997). Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge. Brownrigg, M. (2007). Hearing Place: Film Music, Geography and Ethnicity. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 3(5), 307–323. Bruno, G. (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. Clarke, D.  B. (2003). The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City. London: Routledge. Comolli, J.-L., & Narboni, J. (1990). Cinema/Ideology/Criticism. In N. Browne (Ed.), Cahiers du Cinema Vol. 3: 1969–1972 The Politics of Representation (pp. 58–67). London: Routledge. Debord, G., & Wolman, G. J. (2007). A Users Guide to Detournment. In K. Knabb (Ed.), Situationist International Anthology (pp. 14–20). Berkley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets. Deleuze, G. (2005). Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (H.  Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2011). What Is Philosophy? (H.  Tomlinson & G. Burchill, Trans.). London: Verso. Elsaesser, T., & Hagener, M. (2009). Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses. London: Routledge. Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2011). Considering Materiality in Educational Policy: Messy Objects and Multiple Reals. Education Theory, 61(6), 709–726. Fincher, L.  H. (2014). Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. London: Zed Books.

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Fleming, D. H. (2019). Third-Culture Huàllywood: Or, ‘Chimerica’ the Cinematic Return. Transnational Screens, 10(3), 184–200. Fleming, D. H., & Harrison, S. (2018). Selling Dream (Un)real Estate with Shi(势)-Nema: Manipulation, not Persuasion, in China’s Contemporary Cinematic Cities. Social Semiotics, 30(1), 45–64. Fleming, D. H., & Indelicato, M. (2019). On Transnational Chinese Cinema(s), Hegemony, and Huallywood(s). Transnational Cinemas Journal Huallywood Special Issue., 10(3), 137–147. Frampton, D. (2006). Filmosophy. London: Wallflower. Friedberg, A. (1993). Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. de la Fuente, E., Budarick, J., & Walsh, M. (2012). Altered States: An Essay on Communication and Movement. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 26(1), 39–49. Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist Interventions. Oxford University Press. Hall, S. (2005). Encoding/Decoding. In S.  Hall et  al. (Eds.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–79 (pp.  117–127). London: Routledge. Harrison, S. & Fleming, D.  H. (2019). Metaphoricity in the Real Estate Showroom: Affordance Spaces for Sensorimotor Shopping. Metaphor and Symbol, 34(1), 45–60. Hickey-Moody, A. (2019). Deleuze and Masculinity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hillier, J. & Cao, K. (2013). Deleuzian Dragons: Thinking Chinese Strategic Spatial Planning with Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze Studies, 7(3), 390–405. Jaffee, V. (2006). ‘Every Man a Star’: The Ambivalent Cult of Amateur Art in New Chinese Documentaries. In P. Pickowicz & Y. Zhang (Eds.), From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (pp. 77–108). New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. Jullien, F. (1995). The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China. New York: Zone Books. Khoo, O. (2019). Another Day at The Office: Huallywood Co-productions, Verticality, and the Project of a Comparative Film Studies. Transnational Screens, 10(3), 170–183. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-­ Theory. Oxford University Press. Le Corbusier. (1986). Towards a New Architecture (F. Etchells, Trans.). New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Li, W. (2015). ‘Dancing with Handcuffs and Shackles’: How Product Placement is Adopted by the Chinese Film Industry. PhD Thesis, University of East Anglia. Lin, X. (2010). Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-Garde Art and Independent Cinema. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Marcuse, H. (2002). One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge.

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O’Cass, A., & Siahtiri, V. (2013). In Search of Status through Brands from Western and Asian Origins: Examining the Changing Face of Fashion Clothing Consumption in Chinese Young Adults. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 20(6), 505–515. Potente, D., & Salvini, E. (2009). Apple, IKEA and Their Integrated Architecture. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 35, 32–42. https://doi.org/10.1002/bult.2009.1720350411. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bult.2009.1720350411/full. Ritson, M., Elliott, R., Eccles, S. 1996. “Reframing Ikea: Commodity-Signs, Consumer Creativity and the Social/Self Dialectic.” In K.  P. Corfman & J.  G. Lynch, Jr. (Eds.), NA—Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 23, 127-131. Provo UT: Association for Consumer Research. Ritzer, G. (1998). Introduction. In J.  Baudrillard (Ed.), The Consumer Society. London: Sage. Serino, A., & Haggard, P. (2010). Touch and the Body. Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews, 34(2), 224–236. Shao, P. (2014). Hua Laiwu Dianying Gailun [Introduction to Huallywood Cinema]. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press. Thrift, N. (2010). Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The Affect Theory Reader (pp. 289–308). Durham: Duke University Press. Verilio, P. (1994). The Vision Machine. London: BFI. Woodland, S. (2018). Remaking Gender and the Family: Perspectives on Chinese-­ Language Film Remakes. Leiden and New York: Brill and Verso. Zhang, Z. (Ed.). (2007). The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Durham: Duke University Press. Zhuang Y. J. & Everett A. M. (2018). A Brief History of Chinese Wedding and Bridal Photography Tourism: Through the Lens of Top Chinese Wedding Photographers. In: Yang E., Khoo-Lattimore C.  Eds. Asian Cultures and Contemporary Tourism. Perspectives on Asian Tourism (pp. 79–100). Springer, Singapore. Žižek, S. (2007). Deleuze’s Platonism: Ideas as Real. Lacan.com. Retrieved March 1, 2020, from http://www.lacan.com/zizplato.htm.

Filmography Fei cheng wu rao/If You Are The One 2. Directed by Xiaogang Feng. 2010. Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew. Directed by Zhangke Jia. 2010. Hua li shang ban zu /Design for Living. Directed by Johnnie To. 2015. What Women Want. Directed by Nancy Meyers. 2000. Wo zhi nv ren xin/ I Know Women’s Hearts. Directed by Daming Chen. 2011.

CHAPTER 4

In-dependent Art Shi-Nema: Decomposing the Main Melody via Monu-mental Time-­Images

Architectural plans are displaced by the sequence plans of an invisible montage. —Virilio (2002, p. 444) …a work of art is not a monument: if it has life at all, it exists as a contemporary fact: a fact of esthetics, a fact of religion, a fact of philosophy. —Mumford (1970, p. 447) …a notion of found images and found objects, of encounters and confrontations, is less the sole remit of specific practices and more the general condition of all art. —O’Sullivan (2006, p. 24)

We might recall that the concept of shi has been historically applied to diverse objects and fields of application, spanning the art of ancient war through to painting, calligraphy, geomancy, religion, poetry, literature, modern politics and (as we saw in the previous chapter) urban spatial planning. To this list we here add examples of cinema and museum architecture. This chapter shows how two singular but contemporaneous shi-nematic artworks—that although emerging from two distinct creative universes—actualise analogous expressive forms and thus appear to be undergirded by a common virtual or abstract diagram (as a common response to the historical event of Capitalism’s Second Coming to China). © The Author(s) 2020 D. H. Fleming, S. Harrison, Chinese Urban Shi-nema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_4

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As previously indicated, discussions of shi have historically helped Chinese thinkers and artists expose and exploit the “inherent potentiality at work in configuration” (Jullien 1995, pp. 14–15). Here we harness these ideas to explore how Wang Shu’s Ningbo Historic Museum (2008) and Jia Zhangke’s Shanghai World Expo film Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew (2010) operate as comparable farrago arrangements which, when granted viewers “corporeal intellection” (Mikel Dufrenne in Barker 2009a, p. 18; see also Barker 2009b; Donaldson 2009), serve to breath discordant and disruptive rhythms and mental relations into China’s processual cityscapes. For, after accepting state-sanctioned commissions, both of these enfant terrible artists delighted international and domestic critics by producing attractive national “monuments” that could also be understood as emitting subtle minor counter-rhythms designed to interfere with, critically decompose or deterritorialise the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) zhu xuanlü (main melody or leitmotif )—that dominant political elucidation associated with the modernising China teleologically advancing into a better (consumer culture) future (see e.g. Lin 2010, p. 60; Zhang 2007, p. 2; Jaffee 2006, p. 98). Of particular interest to this chapter, it is through the fractured and piecemeal architectonic structures or cracked “crystalline” form of these modernist vehicles that both artists embed and entangle their micropolitical critiques of the macropolitical modernising processes. The specific examples of what we are here calling in-dependent art shi-­ nema points us towards the socio-political efficacy of specific urban configurations and their deployments, set-ups and dispositions, which reveal fecund resonances with Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari’s theorisation of agential art assemblages—particularly with regard to this latter concept being created to help expose the “flows of power” (see e.g. Buchanan 2015, p. 382). In such light the works of Jia and Wang can be approached as shi-nematic set-ups comparable to those explored in Chap. 2, albeit on this occasion designed as hybrid “action-image” and “time-image” structures intended to innervate a different range of feelings, thoughts, memories, emotions and associations during an extended and embodied durational encounter. Or, to again import Jullien’s language, we here take Wang’s and Jia’s stylistic bricolage shi-nema to be actively involved in the “conditioning of affects” and the “shaping of effect” (1995, pp. 37, 69, emphasis in original) in a manner that “breathes” different energies, rhythms and life into the encounter with urban viewers/visitors. If the previous chapter explored commercial examples of “main melody” shi-nema, then the in-dependent shi-nematic arrangements of this chapter should be understood emitting a distinctly different tune or

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minoritarian rhythm, by using their concrete or material dispositions to provoke thought to move towards the “unsaid” or “unthought” and open up to the “beyond” (an essential aspect of good art, see e.g. Jullien 1995, pp. 76, 85, 130; O’Sullivan 2006, p. 24; Tolstoy 1995). Or, put differently, we argue that Wang’s building and Jia’s film can be read as constellated auteurial examples of art shi-nema that intend to impart a form of (pre)cognitive dissonance—in that they embody a “main melody” aspect demanded by their state commissioners while concomitantly expressing a formal critique of this very position in a discordant minor key, which serves to undermine it. Indeed, Wang’s work constitutes a beguiling architectural artwork that is largely composed out of the left-behind fragments and detritus of older Ningbo streets and buildings—which were bulldozed to make way for the new forms of high-rise apartment complex and commercial structures explored in Chaps. 3, 5 and 6 and our epilogue. Jia’s film, on the other hand, is a state-commissioned artwork that, although assembled out of historical and archival splinters of Shanghai cinema(ticity), essentially reveals continuities with the “independent” director’s career-long fascination with the processes of destruction and demolition linked to Chinese hyper-modernisation. Accordingly, our broader interest in this chapter surrounds how Wang and Jia organise their urban materials to move and impact viewers in a manner that reveals key overlaps with the style and effect of shi, which Jullien explains “openly oscillates between the static and the dynamic,” in a potent affective way (1995, pp. 12–27).

Architecture and/as Cinema Unlike the products of novelists or canvas painters, the fruits of the architecture and film industries also have to meet functional and concrete  (including economic) demands and rationales. Pragmatically speaking, under a system of capitalism, buildings are typically commissioned to house someone or something, while films are designed to entertain and make maximum profit. It is perhaps on account of these combined facts that it is rare, philosophically speaking, for the commissioned fabrications of these two industries to be categorised or evaluated as works of art qua art—and rarer still for them to be judged as “good art,” let alone something like a “masterpiece.” And yet on this outing we look to master examples of an architectural building and a film whose shi-nematic existence in this material plane highlights the artistic import of significant

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form (see e.g. Bell 1995, p. 103). In so doing, we necessarily articulate our investigation with a long but thin stratum of writing that foregrounds not only film’s architectonic principles (a notion of constructing each film from innumerous spatio-temporal blocks is a common enough image as per our epigraph from Virilio) but also the distinctively cinematic qualities (or cinematicity) expressed by certain architectural forms. Consider here again Virilio: So, more than Venturi’s Las Vegas it is Hollywood that merits urbanist scholarship, for, after the theatre-cities of Antiquity and of the Italian Renaissance, it was Hollywood that was the first Cinecitta, the city of living cinema where stage-sets and reality, tax-plans and scripts, the living and the living dead, mix and merge deliriously. (2002, p. 448)

Comparable cross- or post-medium approaches to architecture and cinema have enjoyed something of a resurgence of late, with Giuliana Bruno aphoristically encapsulating this sub-field of enquiry in her quip that “film is architectural and architecture is filmic” (Bruno 2002, p. 56).1 If Virilio takes Hollywood to be the first Cinecitta, though, it is worth noting how others have retroactively backdated such notions. In his essay “Montage and Architecture,” for example, Sergei Eisenstein examines architectural works that were constructed in a time long before filmmaking was a thing—which is to say, before there was a technology, industry or sociotechnical practice known as “the cinema.” Nonetheless, Eisenstein, who was himself a trained engineer and an adept architectural artist, illustrates how various architectural ensembles and dispositions appeared to operate as proto-cinematic “spatiovisual montages” (1989). Albeit here it was the visitor’s legs (rather than a mechanical projector) that were tasked with motoring the embodied eyes around the methodically arranged path (also the term for a film reel’s threaded journey through the projector), so that a sequential arrangement of carefully composed visual “shots” (blocks of space–time) would strategically unfurl before the viewer (Eisenstein 1989, pp.  117–21). For such reasons, Eisenstein describes the Acropolis of Athens as “a perfect example of one of the most ancient films” (ibid.). Of particular relevance to this chapter, though, is how architecture and film also become privileged sites/sights for provoking counter-hegemonic thought and associations during their encounter with viewers. To begin approaching this, we can pick up and extend Eisenstein’s discussion of how certain architectural monuments deploy affective and dialectical

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principles to unleash subtle political critiques of their powerful commissioners.  Here, Eisenstein’s discussions of the Baroque master Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s “malicious” marble montage carved into the base of St Peter’s Baldachin makes for a particularly illustrative case in point here. For, following in the footsteps of a longer line of art historians, Eisenstein explains how viewers tracing a predetermined clockwise path around Bernini’s Papal canopy would be confronted by eight slightly different coats of arms, arrayed upon the base of the structure’s marble columns: with these encrypted carvings each constellating subtle variations of the same symbolic arrangements, which included: the Pope’s family insignia (the Barberini crest, composed of three bees upon a shield); his Papal tiara with crossed keys; a woman’s head at the top, and a stylised or abstracted satyr’s face at the bottom. Interpreting the subtle differences emerging between each repeating coat of arms has historically led critics to perceive an unfolding narrative emerging courtesy of a chronotopic encounter with the orderly work.  A feature that  Eisenstein dialectically  reframes  as an eight shot intellectual montage.  For instance, it is commonly observed that seven instalments of the female head depict her face expressing increasing intensities of pain, while her hair appears to become ever more wild and dishevelled, until she is finally replaced in the eighth variation by a child’s head. Concomitantly, the curved family shield below her embodies what seems to be an evolving deformation: “Flat at first, beginning with the second shield its lower part starts to bulge outward, until with the sixth shield it subsides and remains flat on the last two.” Below this, the satyr’s face—which is commonly interpreted to allegorically evoke the anatomical structure of a vagina— appears to dilate and expand throughout the series. Taking stock of the eight arrangements and their inter-relations (which are animated by the visitor’s path around the structure), a common enough interpretation goes that the series references the birth of an illegitimate Bernini bastard, which Eisenstein (following a line of historical art critics) reads as an unfolding satire in stone of Pope Urban VIII’s (the piece’s commissioner) moral improbity (1989, pp. 121–28). In what follows we will work to show how both Wang’s and Jia’s architectural and architechtonic gallimaufry projects use their formal arrangements in a similarly critical manner. Which is to say, their constellating and bundling of images and affects serve to discharge immiscible signals—here concerning issues of memory, history, time and progress bound up with China’s modernising geopolitical drives—that appear to interfere with the main melody narratives assigned by their powerful commissioners.

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Contemporaries and Counterparts Although operating in different creative worlds, or what Deleuze might term planes of consistency, Jia and Wang share much in common as artists. As already indicated, both are known for producing enthralling artworks that domestic and international critics alike praise for being qualitatively superior to the majority of commercial work produced by their “overground” contemporaries, who by contrast are oft criticised for churning out the forms of main melody “Huallywood” pap we encountered in Chap. 3 (see also Fleming and Indelicato 2019; Fleming 2019; Khoo 2019; Berry 2014) or the ephemeral and flashy “Las Vegas” style (Dickie 2012) of architecture we will encounter in Chap. 6. Certainly, Wang’s Ningbo Historic Museum was awarded the Lu Ban Prize (China’s highest architecture award) in 2009, which was followed shortly thereafter in 2012 by architecture’s most esteemed international accolade, the Pritzker Prize. Meanwhile, Jia’s state-commissioned I Wish I Knew, produced to commemorate the launch of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, was nominated for awards at Cannes and Las Palmas and won artistic distinctions at the Dubai and Hawaii international film festivals. However, before completing these celebrated monumental works Wang’s and Jia’s respective artistic lives and careers reveal several other interesting convergences and parallels. In the first place, both artists grew up in relatively remote rural regions, far from the sprawling urban centres. On the one hand, Jia famously hails from Fenyang in the Northern Shanxi Province, the rural region that would serve as the setting and muse for his globally celebrated “hometown trilogy” (Xiao Wu (1997), Zhantai/ Platform (2000), Ren xiao yao/Unknown Pleasures (2002)). Three films that began exploring and exposing the effects of China’s embrace of globalisation from a peripheral or marginalised perspective. Wang, on the other hand, grew up in Ürümqi in Xinjiang Province, the once autonomous Uyghur region in China’s troubled Northwest. Around the time that Jia released his first feature, Xiao Wu, Wang founded his Amateur Architecture Studio in Hangzhou, along with his wife and professional collaborator, Lu Wenyu. Intriguingly, Jia too would come to marry his career-long collaborator, Tao Zhao, who likewise performs as an important actor and artistic influencer. Jia’s early “underground” work notably helped develop an amateur on-­ the-­spot realist film movement, whose “zero-degree” stylistics, preference for “non-professional-actors,” use of regional vernacular and focus on the

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disenfranchised or excluded underbelly of Chinese modernity were celebrated internationally as a refreshing ethico-aesthetic alternative to the official “main melody” Mandarin cinema (see Zhang 2007; McGrath 2007; Xiao 2011; Fleming 2014a). At the same time, Wang’s studio offered the young prodigy his own platform to “emphasize the spontaneous and experimental aspects of [his] work” and develop a “vernacular” architectural style that was (like Jia’s films) at once opposed to, and in critical dialogue with, the “official and monumental” style of his state-­ sanctioned contemporaries (Wang in Cilento 2012, n.p.). By the turn of the millennium Jia’s oeuvre had gradually served to cement his auteurial reputation as the wunderkind of Chinese Indy cinema. His andante lyrical films here  became renowned and rewarded for their “outstanding aesthetic and intellectual qualities” (Deppman 2015, p. 195), their “poetic imaginativeness” and a weighty “psychological subtlety” that demanded the participation of active rather than passive viewers (Xiao 2011). Drawing comparable reviews from the architectural world, Wang’s “critical regionalism” and eco-aesthetics were equally lauded for opening up “new horizons” of possibility while retaining a poetic and intellectual resonance “with place and memory” (see Cilento 2012, n.p.). As their careers matured, both artists’ collective corpora increasingly revealed comparable auteurial fingerprints, linked to a shared obsession with the relentless demolition and rubbling of old Chinese buildings, cities and lifestyles in the wake of the nation’s breakneck pursuit of modernisation and globalisation. Wang regularly criticised the “wanton demolition” that he saw leaving “many of the nation’s cities fragmented and almost unrecognisable to their citizens” (Dickie 2012, n.p.), for example, while Jia’s work telegraphed similar alarm regarding the progressive destruction of urban environments, which he saw signalling “the end of something” and “the beginning of a new era” (Jia in Bordeleau 2013, p. 28). For Jia, the loosely defined Urban Generation film movement—of which he is often namechecked as a key member—is best conceived of as a dissolute band of filmmakers or films that “complemented and resonated with one another” thanks to their attempts to capture and record “a trace that would have otherwise been lost”—this being a trace that is also “a scar,” or a wound in the body politic, “leaving a pain behind” that is both “in history and in us” (Jia 2010, n.p.). Jiwei Xiao describes Jia’s careerlong “critique of Chinese urbanization and modernization” as being unique among his contemporaries, though, on account of being “filtered

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through a poetic, often elegiac, view of the ephemeral present” (2011, n.p.). Others also perceive an atypical mode of presenting in Jia’s work, with critics variously applauding him as a “clairvoyant chronicler of China’s neoliberalisation” who enacts a form of “preservation against neoliberal creative destruction” (David Leiwei Li 2016, p. 169), a “cinematic poet of the past” that is obsessively “drawn to the texture of detritus” (Andrew and Xu 2011, p. 32) and an artist whose work unfolds and expresses an inimitable “poetics of vanishing” (Zhang 2011, p. 148). Erik Bordeleau similarly reads the director’s tropological obsession with demolition serving to transcend representational and symbolic systems, with his ethicoaesthetics best being understood as an intensive political force that elevates images of destruction and detritus to the level of intercessor or interpolator. Which is to say, Jia’s “eye of chai” (拆 demolition, the image often painted on Chinese walls or buildings to signal that they are to be torn down) stylistic invites viewers to approach the world “by the middle,” while steering their thoughts and associations towards the “intersection or in-betweeness of things” (Bordeleau 2013, p. 26). Of course, notions of Jia’s inbetweenness can also be stretched to account for his rare position of being a filmmaker who successfully transitioned from being an “underground” filmmaker to an “Independent” one (see e.g. McGrath 2007; Tonglin Lu 2006). Jia’s 2004 independent film Shije/The World, to which we will return in the following chapter, marked the director’s first brush with official Chinese filmmaking and was his first film to gain a legal release within the PRC. It is important to note here that while the notion of “Independent” filmmaking typically means privately funded (and in the Western context roughly means “independent from Hollywood”), within mainland discourses the term “independent” more precisely describes Chinese filmmakers whose art films are funded by transnational and international funding bodies but would nevertheless remain open to state censorship through SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television). For this reason Paul Pickowicz describes Jia working in a state of “in dependence,” precisely because his productions remained dependent upon foreign and domestic patrons and powers in order to get made and screened (2006, p. vii). As the two works we explore below likewise embody a blend of artistic independence and financial and censorial dependence, we have opted to append the label “in-dependent urban shi-nema” to both. As might be becoming clear, we here articulate the Ningbo Historic Museum, as an emblematic example of Wang’s shi-nematic work, to the politico-aesthetics of the contemporaneous Urban Generation of Chinese

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filmmakers. By similar coin, though, our focus upon the shi-nematicity of Wang’s building invites us to also trace a reverse path to perceive comparable architectonic strategies at play within Jia’s Expo film, which adopts similar museographic tactics in its response to the same in-forming socio-­ political and psychogeographic forces and factors. To risk adding another relational cross-reference into the mix, we might note how Chinese landscape art or “mountain and water” drawings form another common vector transversally linking Jia’s and Wang’s work. Such drawings are a traditional art form that Jullien sees crystallising the role and function of shi in Chinese art and becoming manifest as a dynamic and stylistic actualisation of impulsive forces and energies that affectively flow to, and effect, the viewer (Jullien 1995, p. 71ff). Pointedly, in a keynote lecture entitled “Geometry and Narrative of Natural Form” (2011) Wang describes the pedagogical impact of these traditional forms upon his own “experimental architecture.” He there notes how the scale, form, style and “atmosphere” of these painted scrolls teach the lessons of “ancient Chinese philosophy and religion” directly: especially regarding the fractalised flows of energy that substrate and interconnect natural landscapes, Chinese cities, their buildings and inhabitants. Of further significance to our discussions below, Wang (2011) describes his 30,000 m2 Ningbo museum as having an agential energy and internal “narrative system” modelled upon mountains, valleys, caves and water (Fig. 4.1). Jia’s films also reveal an aesthetic fascination with landscapes and spaces and affectively harness the flows of energy moving through them. None more so than his San xia hao ren/Still Life (2006), we might add—an andante film that traces the intersecting lives of different characters affected by the building of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam project. This being a mega-dam of heretofore unimaginable engineering proportions that was completed in 2009 to create a “reservoir the size of Lake Superior” in order to help energise China’s new modern cities: the weight of which was also felt to “slightly alter the earth’s axis and increase the length of everyday by a microscopic amount” (Li 2016, p. 171). Characteristically, rather than celebrate the modernist subjugation of “nature” into a form of standing reserve for the purposes of powering new consumer lifestyle cities (see Li 2016, pp.  184–5), Jia’s surreal (rather than realist) film opens up a dilated moment of inbetweenness that invites viewers to grasp the passing of the rubbled city of Fengjie before the rising waters envelop the ancient landscape forever. These ideas become most pronounced in poetic images

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Fig. 4.1  The Ningbo Historic Museum

filmed beneath the red lines that mark out the future water levels upon the remaining buildings, or a scene featuring a team of archaeologists frantically attempting to excavate a historically significant site before the landscape is submerged and these material traces of the past are lost forever.

Museums and World Expos: A Postsocialist (Post) modernity? For the philosopher and archaeologist of knowledge Michel Foucault, museums and cinema provided concrete examples of what he calls heterotopic spaces. These are spaces that hold a general relation of “direct or inverted analogy” to actual everyday spaces and virtual non-spaces such as utopias. As historically contingent inventions, Foucault described museums and the cinema as heterotopic “memory machines” that were peculiar to Western modernity. Museums, for example, revealed a will to enclose and accumulate “all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes” in one space, thus becoming “a place of all time that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages” (Foucault 1984, n.p.). Lewis Mumford similarly saw

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museums as a uniquely modern(ist) invention, although he felt that these institutions more precisely surfaced as a defensive reaction to increasingly overwhelming encounters with accumulated time and duration bound up in the material city (1970, p. 4). If the museum is a distinctively modernist invention that brought together the past in one place for the inspection of a viewer, it was also a machinic device that historically emerged in tandem with the World Fair or Expo, which can be understood as its temporal complement and counterpoint. Which is to say, the history museum and the Expo help delineate the Janus faces of the wider modernist project. The latter here orients itself towards modernity’s utopic future (a virtual space articulated to where the actual present world is going), while the former stares back into the past to help reaffirm the teleological processes of modernisation that progressively led up to this present site/sight (how historical progress led to the present world). Interestingly, we can locate inverted traces of these telescoping drives in the two Chinese commissions under scrutiny below: with dioramas and projection displays that recall the futurist exhibitions of yesteryear’s World Fairs appearing embedded within Wang’s history museum and a distinctively curatorial museographic logic being elevated to the main organising structure behind Jia’s Expo film. Linked to such discussions, Anna Greenspan illuminates how the Shanghai World Expo exposed a somewhat anachronistic or disjunctive relationship to earlier modernist projects and political narratives. For in Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (2014) she describes the 2010 Expo revealing a complex form of looking forward that was simultaneously a “harking back” (Greenspan 2014, pp.  2–3). Unlike the much-lauded 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, for instance,  international observers often appeared to be unaffected, unmoved or somewhat indifferent to the Shanghai events, likely seeing the very notion of World Fairs as an already quaint and outdated relic of a bygone era—or a naïve modernist practice whose time had come and gone. In comparing the different perceptions of the Shanghai World Expo from within and without China, Greenspan is finally led to reactivate one of Ackbar Abbas’ famous dictums to say: if the CCP felt that the Expo reified a modernist drive that showed the nation was now getting “Back to the Future,” outside of China the perception was more precisely that the Shanghai event exposed the nation moving “Forward to the Past” (Greenspan 2014, p. 2). Irrespective of how the Expo event was politically or conceptually being perceived, though, the build-up to the 2010 event saw Shanghai literally

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transform into a city that was more “process than place” (Greenspan 2014, p. 2). What is important to emphasise here is that these modernising processes bore witness to an unprecedented erasure of the city’s existing infrastructure and formal psychogeography, with all neighbourhoods deemed to be standing in the way of this progress becoming earmarked for ruthless destruction (marked with the image of chai). In Timothy Morton’s terms, this could be read as the erasure of the material memory of Shanghai as a durational hyperobject (2013, pp. 90–1) in order to redevelop it in accordance with the dictates of a new set of abstract machines and functions, concepts and processes that became central to both Jia’s Shanghai Expo film and Wang’s Ningbo Tengtou Pavilion, which also showcased at the Shanghai Expo event. In attempting to summarise both artists’ outlooks with regard to these modernising processes during this period, it helps to take a brief detour through a famous line of thought offered by Mumford in The Culture of Cities (1970). For there, anticipating the arguments forwarded by Morton regarding urban form as memory, Mumford describes cities as organic “products of time,” which make time itself palpable to the senses. On account of the sheer “diversity of its time-structures,” though, the city essentially escapes “the tyranny of a single present, and the monotony of a future that consists in repeating only a single beat heard in the past” (1970, p. 4). However, if Mumford perceived the twentieth-century city to be a multi-layered heterochronic “symphony” or arrangement, the same is not necessarily true of the new top-down designed cities of millennial China. There, the macropolitical architects of modernity, marching to the beat of the CCP’s main melody, increasingly commanded the bulldozing of the old to make way for new-fangled forms of “impatient architecture” (a term used by architect Rahul Mehrotra to describe China’s contemporary commercial forms (quoted in Kmata01 2012)). In trying to better understand Wang’s and Jia’s urban work in relation to these forces, we might playfully detour2 Mumford’s psychogeographic observations to say something more like: In Chinese cities during the early twenty-first century, time itself was increasingly becoming invisible, being replaced by the tyranny of a monotonous melody, whose future consisted in repeating a single modernising beat heard (already elsewhere) in the past. It is precisely with such processes, which were not limited to Shanghai during this period, that the state-commissioned urban artworks of Wang and Jia appear to critically respond, for both artists began tactically salvaging and repurposing old matter and materials, signs and images, spat out in

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the wake of these modernising drives, saving, recombining and repurposing this urban detritus in an affective agential manner. Wang’s Ningbo Tengtou Pavilion, for example, was famously composed out of the rubble and detritus of wrecked Ningbo neighbourhoods, which were then re-­ arranged into dense façades replete with jagged and angular “demolition holes.” The structure’s high-stacked walls granted the pavilion an appearance of being a monstrous architectural owl pellet, seemingly spat out by some rapacious mythical beast. With this image in mind, it becomes appropriate to offer a brief exegesis on our specific use of the term “assemblage” with regard to agential artworks in what follows and whose expressive matrices and significant forms inculcate and innervate a (re)encounter with history, memory and duration.

Assemblage Art/Theory Ian Buchanan reminds us that the word “assemblage” is Brian Massumi’s English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s French term agencement: a concept that always already encompasses a range of different meanings including “to arrange, to dispose, to fit up, to combine, to order” (Law in Buchanan 2015, p. 383). J. Macgregor Wise adds that this concept also often invokes “putting together,” “arrangement,” “laying out,” “layout” or “fitting” (2011, p. 92), ideas that become germane to our understanding of Wang’s and Jia’s bricolage practices and architectonic principles. For Buchanan, the English term “arrangement” ultimately provides a better fit to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, particularly if we think of a “musical arrangement” or a “working arrangement,” wherein what we encounter is an on-going process rather than a static situation (2015, p. 383). On account of such qualities, Jane Bennett (who as discussed earlier also articulates assemblage theory with the Chinese concept of shi) is led to describe assemblages as “living, throbbing confederations” or conglomerates of human and inhuman forces and bodies whose energy-agency displays an ability to affect other bodies and ignite becomings (2010, p. 23ff). Of further significance to the forms of shi-nematic arrangement we explore here, Wise points to how there are always already many different meanings centrifugally gathered within, or centripetally emanating from, Deleuze and Guattari’s loaded philosophical concept. In the field of geology, for example, assemblage is used to describe a group of fossils that contingently “characterise a particular stratum” (Wise 2011, p.  91).

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Similarly, in archaeology and ecology, the term is deployed to describe a grouping of objects or organisms that incidentally share a common habitat. As we will discover, the monumental projects of Jia and Wang embody their own geological, archaeological and ecological vectors, which emerge via a haptic experiential encounter with their sensational works. Consideration of such factors finally point to a notion of inhuman agency bound up in their shi-nematic arrangements, oft related to how the heterogeneous fragments, forces, bodies, qualities and territories co-­ composing them come together in complex ways to act, affect and do things. In light of this, we might say that in contradistinction to other typical examples of overground or mainstream Chinese visual culture, Wang’s and Jia’s in-dependent agential arrangements demand more of their viewers than simply decoding familiar clichés and representational images and should rather be understood as artworks that intend to innervate novel sensations and ignite thought. In What Is Philosophy? (2011) Deleuze and Guattari paint a comparable picture when they claim that art and sculpture should be understood in terms of intensive rhythmic territories or as complex conglomerates of sensational bundles of affects and precepts. These appear “almost in their pure state” in sculpture, they argue, courtesy of “its sensations of stone, marble, or metal, which vibrate according to the order of strong and weak beats, projections and hollows, its powerful clinches that intertwine them, its developments of large spaces between groups or within a single group where we no longer know whether it is the light or the air that sculpts or is sculpted” (2011, p. 168). This is a description that near perfectly anticipates the forms of sculptural intensity that the Pritzker Prize jury rewarded in Wang’s architectural work, as can be evidenced by their description of the artist as a “virtuoso” who appears to be “in full command of the instruments of architecture—form, scale, material, space and light” (in Yang 2012, n.p.). What is more, when we consider below that these elements all come together to impact and affect viewers and visitors, these plaudits indicate that Wang’s stylish architecture not only leapfrogs the boundary separating more functional or practical buildings from aesthetic examples that get counted as “art,” but pushes it further into that more rare and meaningful category of “great art.” For as we will soon discover, in compliance with Nelson Goodman’s influential arguments in “How Buildings Mean,” Wang’s Ningbo Historic Museum “signifies, means, refers, symbolises” in a distinctly shi-nematic way (Goodman 1985, p. 643).

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Independent Time-Image Shi-nema To reiterate before moving on, for their museum and Expo projects Wang and Jia both salvage and sculpt found materials in order to constellate vibrant agential assemblages that subtly destabilise or interfere with the modernist main melody. Recognition of these minoritarian trends in turn points to a shared artistic or abstract diagram undergirding their bricoleur commissions, whose syncretic and sensational arrangements of raw cinematic/city materials expressively “dramatise concepts” in a manner that ignites what Iain MacKenzie and Robert Porter term an “event of thought” (2011, p.  66). This being a dramatic encounter that prompts viewers to think and, especially here, to “recover” the events that conditioned the emergence of these bundles of sensation in the first place (MacKenzie and Porter 2011, p. 67). By such measures Wang and Jia can be perceived as evental artists (artists of an event, whose work signals viewers from the vantage of the future) whose rhythmic material bundles of sensation lay in wait, promising to affectively provoke viewers to grapple with what Deleuze calls the unthought that precedes thought (2004, p. 176; 2005b, p. 182). Because Wang’s and Jia’s variegated artworks deal with history and memory, past, present and future, in such complex ways, Deleuze’s conceptualisations of the cinematic “movement-image” and “time-image” also suggest themselves as useful categories for approaching these works, even if this conceptual dyad was originally mapped over a historical break inculcated by World War II (predominantly in Europe). In working to abstract these models from this situated historical narrative, though, we might recall that Deleuze initially described movement-images emanating from a diverse range of “classical” pre-war cinemas—ranging from Eisenstein’s formalist Soviet work to Hollywood studio films—that operated as a mass techno-art striving to mould the masses into a group subject or unite them under a unified banner. Such cinemas unloaded stories wherein “the people” (the proletariat or the mythical founders of a nation) were always already there: “often real before being actual, ideal without being abstract” (Deleuze 2005b, p. 208). In contrast to these, Deleuze later observed a disillusioned and discontinuous modern cinema emerging in the post-war world. In this, an altogether different image of time and politics began to be thought by the cinema. Hereafter, time increasingly appeared “out of joint” or freed of its usual subjugation to movement and action (Deleuze, 2005b, p. xi). What

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is more, “the people” were conspicuously missing, either because they “no longer exist, or not yet” (2005b, p.  208). Critics working with Hong Kong, Taiwanese and PRC cinemas in the new millennium have increasingly incorporated, adopted or adapted Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) philosophical concepts to help articulate these models to other intense periods of political change, crisis, disruption, disjunction, war or becoming (see e.g. Yau 2001; Tong 2003; Wong 2005; Martin-Jones 2006, 2011; Zhang 2007; Ma 2010; Berry 2007, 2014; Martin-Jones and Fleming 2014). Yet others have engineered encounters between Deleuze’s cinema models and the work of Urban Generation filmmakers, including Jia (Bordeleau 2013; Fleming 2014a, 2014b, 2013; Holtmeier 2014; Li 2016). On this outing we are driven to creatively stretch their applications further still, however, to account for the urban shi-nematicity of Wang’s assemblage architecture, which we argue also synthesises different narrative principles that we can read through a blended model of movement-image and time-image regimes. These amount to nearly symptomatic hybrid-image forms that David Martin-Jones links to the work of filmmakers working during intense periods of crisis or discontinuity within different national contexts (2006, p. 37).

Ningbo’s Monu-mental Hybrid-Image Historical Museum A palpable cinematicity becomes tangible everywhere within and around the Ningbo Historic Museum. Inside, various intermedia displays and exhibitions are harnessed to unfold the “People’s narrative,” with its familiar prehistoric beginning (where primitive-looking stone-age Hemudu people make the Chinese people real before being actual), its civilising middle (with struggles against British and European oppressors and enemies) and end (our arrival at the modernising present from where a virtual utopic future is projected forward). Across several arcades a whole parliament of transmedia technologies are deployed to unfold this teleological story, ranging from frozen tableaus populated by wax pre-humans to animated diorama displays, cinematic projections, televisual lectures and “post-cinematic” performing digital 3D holograms. Together, this transmedia assemblage unfolds the parallel histories of Ningbo and China, using the microcosm as a parable for the macrocosm.

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Recalling a silent-era form of cinema, the various Ningbo display scenes are typically linked together by a series of sequential intertitle-like boards, written in both Mandarin and English (reproduced verbatim below). These provide a series of ordered points whereby viewers are invited to pause and read, before moving into the next scene or onto the next phase of history. To get to one of the first darkened display rooms viewers initially pass through a foyer populated with a mock-up of the hyperreal “small Manhattan” (Wang 2011) Yinzhou CBD (Central Business District) skyline that is located just outside the museum (and contains a pseudo-simulacra of New York’s Chrysler building, updated with flashing LED façades). These miniatures of the modern corporate towers crowd around the first intertitle board, which is entitled “Prologue”: The old Ningbo City, like many other historic cities in the world, is fading away as silently as time flies away… The Old Ningbo City, a hallmark in Ningbo history and culture, is the root of this city, a heritage of folk customs surviving this fast-changing world, a priceless gift from our ancestors, and the source of which our passions, values and ideology repose. Now when we step into the Old Ningbo City, meandering along the long blackstone path, lingering in the historic houses, appealed to the beautiful bone-inlaid wooden works, we are looking for a long-dreamed road back to our home—the Old Ningbo City.

Visitors thereafter enter into a recreated plaster simulacra of an “Old Ningbo City” street, replete with moving hologrammatic figures in period costume that take turns preparing traditional food (which can be purchased through vending machines that activate the holograms on receiving a coin). During weekends the same street is given a renewed breath of Cinecitta life by real human actors and culinary aromas, with the former preparing and selling Baozi (steamed buns) and Tangyuan (a local dessert made from glutinous rice balls) which the museum visitors can purchase and consume on site/sight. On such occasions the scene literally comes alive like a film set, providing visitors with ample opportunities to take photos and selfies on their cameras and smartphones. On the walls of one spice store opposite a hologrammatic food store, a palpable cinematicity emits from a vintage black-and-white pull-out poster of the classical “Golden Era” movie star Hu Die, who stares out from the July 1935 pages of Movie & Music Monthly (this being the same year that Mao

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became the chairman of the Communist Politburo and Mauss recovered in a hospital in New York as mentioned in Chap. 2). On closer inspection it is evident that the characters, actors and plaster figures playing a role in this “Old Ningbo City” street are all ethnically Han. A detail that Melissa Brown and David O’Brien elsewhere describe as a deliberate strategy to Sinisize or ethnically sanitise Chinese history, in this scenario by strategically omitting any “clear signs of Ningbo’s multi-­ cultural past” (Brown and O’Brien 2019, p. 17). Around the bend of the street a frozen band of Han acrobats taking part in a heteronormative wedding celebration point viewers towards the next intertitle board, which is fastened to the wall of a mock-up heritage home: Construction of Man and Heaven—Ningbo Old House Architecture is born from human’s life and practice. Chinese buildings are constructed on bricks and stones in a wooden structure, featuring regional distinctiveness in different places. Living in the warm and humid place in the South China, Ningbo ancestors build innovative fence-style house supported by columns as early as seven thousand years ago. By centuries of development, the Ningbo folk houses are now built with high ceilings and commodious courtyards with black bricks supported by white walls, projecting a stately and simple elegance. The decorations in traditional Ningbo folk house, from the courtyard to the hall, are carefully designed to the effect that Ningbo folk culture and traditional residential custom are deeply admired.

Somewhat ironically, one later realises that the type of buildings represented here in their simulacral absence are present in an actual pulverised form all around us, after being packed into the edifices of Wang’s enrobing fractured walls (more on which below). In the museum’s final display room viewers eventually catch up to the lived present, where the final intertitle board juxtaposes a looped projection of a science fiction movie that screens inches above a scale model of the modern city, replete with a nebulae of miniature LED streetlights: Conclusion 7000 years ago, when Hemudu people lit the fire of civilization on the Ningshao Plain and seeded their hopes at side of the Yaojiang River, we were rooted deeply into the fertile land. Civilization trees were getting thicker with luxuriant leaves, deep roots and abundant fruits. Walking through this section of history, we seem to have passed through a spacetime tunnel,

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experiencing the bitterness of our ancestors’ hard work and at the same time the sweetness of the creations of our talented predecessors. Today’s Ningbo has been an important port in south-east China and an economic centre at the southern part of the Yangtze River delta. This oriental “Holy Boat” is hoisting highly its sails driving towards a more splendid tomorrow.

If the conclusion of this (hi)story points forward into the “splendid” future in an unbroken line or tunnel from the primitive past (through the struggles of war and colonisation), we can clearly align this illustrated narrativisation with a Deleuzian movement- or action-image (like the SAS’ structure of Chap. 3). However, it would be appropriate to note at this juncture that the arrangements and displays placed inside the museum were not part of Wang’s brief and that he was charged with designing the artistic shell within which all future national museum objects and displays would be housed and curated. His final design does not constitute what we might call an empty or odourless container or white-walled box, though, which curators can work in/with without confronting its background radiation or affective interference. Linked to this, and as intimated above, there concomitantly appears to be a second formal “narrative” structure at work in and around the museum building that actively interferes with this linear story. In searching for evidence of such phenomena beyond the concrete form of the building (and more on which below), it is noteworthy that Wang (2011) maintains that his work never embeds just one “single logic” but always puts at least “two logics” into play. In a lecture about his style and inspirations he notes that Chinese landscape artists also traditionally strove to implant two or more “narration systems” within a single scroll or paining (something that Jullien also touches upon in his explorations of the operations of shi (1995, pp. 75–149)). Key here, though, is when discussing the Ningbo museum’s narrative systems, Wang specifically likens his building’s aesthetic to “movie logic,” or else a “Western cubist” aesthetic—that implies perspectival shifts in time and space (Wang 2011). We might infer from this that Wang is referring to modernist cinema rather than its classical manifestations and gestures towards the existence of a time-image logic. Or, more precisely, over and above the linear (hi) story discussed above, Wang’s museum boasts what we might call a cracked “crystal-image” form, which serves to unground or “deterritorialise” the teleological (sequentially ordered past, present and future of the political

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main melody) action-image contents nested within. Which is to say, the second narration systems embodied within the Ningbo museum imparts a temporal signature that disturbs the progressive people’s story within. As discussed, these two systems might converge into a third hybrid-­ image form. This is experienced by viewers in a manner that recalls how the two distinct tones made by different tuning forks co-compose to make a unique third frequency, without ever losing the two distinct waveforms or pitches that combine to create the sound that is sensed or perceived. Wang’s cracked and jagged expressionistic building certainly unleashes a different political and philosophical image of the relationship between the past and the present. It is to this that we now turn.

Cracked, Crystalline, Cinematic Walls Wang employs two unique architectural techniques that lead to his museum building expressing quasi-cinematic qualities. The first is an indexical technique achieved by impressing bamboo stems into wet cement. This leaves a grey indexical imprint of an organic reality in certain wall sections that recall the imaging techniques of black-and-white celluloid. The second, as discussed, found Wang salvaging and repurposing raw materials left in the wake of the destruction of Old Ningbo (Wang 2011), which he then used to construct a “timeless,” or more precisely time-­ image, form. Here, the building’s heavy walls are all but entirely constructed through an “almost lost” wapan tiling technique. This is a “tradition of emergency wall building” (see Pasternack 2009, n.p.; Wang 2011) that demands recycling and reusing materials left in the wake of “disasters” (emphasis ours), whereby one would layer in “bricks, tiles and stones to repair a hole here, a crack over there” (Averna in Basulto 2012, n.p.). By both recovering and tactically elevating this organic ad hoc post-­ disaster technique to the starting point of his museum project, Wang began recycling and redeploying the wasted “bricks and other materials salvaged from neighbourhoods that were demolished to make way for the new developments” (Wang in Dickie 2012). Importantly, in a manner that recalls Mumford’s discussion of the organic heterochronic nature of a city’s symphonic time-structures, Wang notes that the raw materials he repurposed invariably varied “from dozens of years to hundreds of years old” (Wang in Jacobson 2014, p.  139). His venerable patchwork technique, observes Averna, ostensibly turns the finished commission into a

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political and ecological masterpiece, which “introduces a history in the construction” while also endowing the walls with “an ‘overdose of time’ without having to wait for aging” (in Basulto 2012, n.p.). By constellating the detritus of demolition into new experiential arrangements, Wang’s building can also be understood as a massive sculptural assemblage that sensually and haptically communicates with its immersed and dwarfed viewers. To such end, the architect describes his monumental shi-nematic construction in terms of a “living creature,” whose form grew organically on account of its repurposed heterogeneous content (Pasternack 2009, n.p.), granting it a strange living “skin” that literally and metaphorically allows the artwork to “breathe” (Wang 2011). What is more, the un-uniform dimensions and shapes of the raw materials result in every part of the museum being a singular or “unique unrepeatable piece,” albeit if “every centimeter is different from the next” the building does retain an overarching (fractalactic) structural unity and expressivity (Basulto 2012, n.p.). Beyond its organic embryology, the confederate building also appears to boast other life-like or agential qualities, which can be extracted from the reports of various visitors and commentators that have phenomenologically experienced it. The Pritzker Prize jury, for instance, echoed Wang in describing the museum as “one of those unique buildings that while striking in photos, is even more moving when experienced” (in Yang 2012, n.p.; Wang 2011). Inferring comparable agency, Grace Ong Yang describes Wang’s building as a living moving landscape, which visitors inhabit in a “wonderfully cinematic” way (2012, n.p.). Alejandro Aravena comparably outlines a “powerful” and “moving” formalism that communicates with viewers “at the level of feeling” (Cilento 2012, n.p.). Or elsewhere, she describes being “hit by the building” and experiencing an intense form of “impact” that is more commonly associated with one’s encounters with “music or film”: in that the building is “extremely moving and touching to the point of altering the mood in a deep positive way” (Averna in Basulto 2012, n.p.). The notion of being hit or affected by the sensational building again exposes a form of intent, which from the viewers’ perspective recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the “wound as event.” In recapitulating their example, John Phillips describes a wound (or wounding) in terms of a coming together of a knife and the flesh in a manner that exceeds the simple addition of the former to the latter (2006, p. 109). For the notion of being impacted, or hit, by Wang’s building must also account for the

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event of the encounter, wherein two bodies move into dynamic composition in a manner that modifies or transforms the constituent relations of one or both bodies. For others, this moving encounter is more akin to a form of dance—or a dynamic passage and coming together that unfolds in between vibrational bodies. In such descriptions we again find resonances with a shi-inflected assemblage theory, whereby the whole and the parts are linked courtesy of an arrangement that occurs in time. To similar ends, Clarke Jacobson feels that Wang’s unusual constellation of horizontal and vertical slits and fissures (that serve as the museum’s windows) break up the heavy walls in a manner that transcends pattern to invoke a palpable “rhythm” (2014, p. 139). By likening architecture to music in similar ways, many commentators appear to upturn or undermine the traditional hierarchy of the arts imagined by Arthur Schopenhaur, wherein the ephemeral spiritual nature of music leads to it being situated high above the dirty domain of architecture, whose practical reliance upon bricks, beams, mortar, mouldings, pillars and pipes means it literally becomes the most down-to-earth of all the arts (Goodman 1985, p. 642). Consider in such light then Goodman’s argument that a building can “express feelings it does not feel, ideas it cannot think or state, activities it cannot perform,” meaning that although a building literally “blows no brass and beats no drums, some buildings are aptly described as ‘jazzy’” (1985, p. 646). To us, the perception of the windows and skewed walls as one moves around and within the building reveal how music and architecture, like music and cinema, share in affective and intensive affinities, or else immingle in a way that are not merely descriptive or representational (see e.g. Goodman 1985, p.  462). To playfully invert Timothy Morton here: To this extent dancing about architecture really is like writing about music— “and a good thing too. Everything is like that” (Morton 2013, pp. 90–1). Linked to this, we might also note that the majority of the building’s rhythmic slits and fissures are actually blocked framing devices, which neither let light into the museum’s interior nor shatter the views of the outside government buildings or the Las Vegas-like “small Manhattan” for those within. To us, these countless dark slits and fissures thus also vividly recall the “memory holes” that punctuate the building of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 (1983, p. 36) and draw viewers’ attention towards all the other smaller holes, cracks and splits that appear when one gets closer and sees the porous walls at a different fractal scale.

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While a few of the slits in Wang’s building serve as staff office windows, their general defiance of practicality is also in part due to the cinematic configurations of the museum’s inner displays, which, as already intimated, require relative darkness to best unfold their transmedial melodic movement-­image story. While these rhythmic windows’ non-utilitarian nature may serve to render them as pure aesthetic features from the outside, their voiding of natural light from the interior does also contribute towards another important phenomenological experience. For as viewers exit the artificially and dimly lit historic display spaces on the museum’s third floor, they are suddenly, and somewhat jarringly, exposed to natural daylight again, which serves to transfigure the modernist present in a glaringly disorienting and defamiliarising manner. To our mind, the “narrative” of caves evoked by Wang’s building might here be fruitfully mapped onto the proto-cinematic allegory of Plato’s cave, wherein the prisoner freed of the darkened interior caverns ascends into the light of the Real, only to be confronted by the realisation that what they have heretofore seen were but the shadows of a false world of illusions. Significantly, in the real sunlight and decking of the museum’s third floor an intensely tactile experience unfolds, with a notion of thickened viscous time becoming imparted by the museum’s dazzling jagged walls. That is, the bricolage building begins, courtesy of its own broken and skewed form, to actively interfere with the otherwise slick “spacetime tunnel” image that the internal display rooms attempt to erect. Alex Pasternack describes a similar effect, arguing that Wang’s walls here work “to draw history out of the museum for the benefit of the public,” by generating a feeling that “history has literally become part of the museum” (2009, n.p.). For us, with its canted and skewed walls, the cinematicity imparted by the roof terrace also vividly recalls, or autodidactically recreates, the uneasy expressionistic mise-en-scène of Robert Wiene’s lichtspiel horror The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) (see Figs. 4.2 and 4.3). What is more, as one motors through and in between its seemingly dilating and contracting walls, a subtle respiratory affect imparts an unsettled feeling, making one feel unbalanced, or slightly seasick.3 If at a distance such expressionistic angles and lines serve to macroscopically distort and pervert the “establishing shots” of the surrounding “small Manhattan” landscape (on most days we visited Ningbo’s atmospheric pollution completely obscures any view of the surrounding mountains), at the close-up or micro level Wang foregrounds a range of prominent stone and clay images and signs for the viewers’ corporeal

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Fig. 4.2  Expressionistic cinematicity

intellection. In point of fact, within his larger wapan project certain “symbolic” fragments appear to have been rhythmically disposed, so that a predetermined stroll past a wall serves to unfurl a form of Bernini-­Eisensteinian (architectonic-cum-cinematic) dialectical montage—replete with its own masonic “intertitles” and commentary. For example, a walk across the roof terrace finds a series of imprinted bricks and embossed acroteria blocks flow by about head level. One particular path takes viewers past a keystone embossed with the Chinese character fú (福 meaning “happiness,” “luck” or “good fortune”) and a red clay Socialist-era brick stamped with three stars of the “CBC Trademark” company before leading on to an ornate stone that is possibly several hundred years old featuring a relief carved landscape with weeping trees. Another particularly busy section of wall allows mobile viewers to encounter a sudden cascade of comparable keystones, which evoke a quasi-Stone Age Stan Brakhage flicker film effect (Figs. 4.4 and 4.5). Of course, the sheer number of symbols, signs and fragmented stone and clay enunciations necessarily gather new meanings after they become packed within Wang’s waping “eye of chai” arrangement, as do the

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Fig. 4.3  Expressionistic horror

countless cracks and crevices in between them, which subtly evoke the inestimable gaps in memory that exist in and around the museum space. Collectively these images and holes thus demand that  people’s thought grope towards the virtual presence of the now absent buildings and historical neighbourhoods of which they were all once a part. It is through such affects that we can grasp the building’s significant form constituting a shi-nematic “crystal-image” that pushes thought towards the inbetweenness of things. That is, a zone of indiscernibility that emerges in between the past and the future, the actual and the virtual, and through which a bit of time in its pure state becomes palpable: “what we see in the crystal is time itself, a bit of time in the pure state, the very distinction between the two images which keeps on reconstituting itself” (Deleuze 2004, p. 79). Picking up on similar ideas, and in a manner that vividly recalls Jia’s auteurial fingerprint, Karen Cilento describes Wang’s museum walls elevating time itself to a tangible object of thought, while inviting viewers to approach the world “by the middle” (2012, n.p.), for Wang’s “distinctive manner of integrating discarded elements allows his building to not only physically reference the history of building in China, but also [to breathe] life into the structure” in a highly emotional manner that is experienced as “a physical memory of the past” (Cilento 2012, n.p.). As if confirming

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Fig. 4.4  Rhythmical stone montaging

this, in a touching moment in several of his lectures and interviews the architect describes meeting an old woman who kept returning to his museum’s third floor in order, he says, to sit among this rubble and touch the old stones that were once parts of her now lost neighbourhood. A sense of Wang’s building extending into history is further invoked by the enfolding or in-folding of other temporal durations and deeper indices of time. A garden of jagged rocks and larger rounded boulders flank the base of the museum’s outer walls, for example, in a style that not only makes it difficult to approach the mountainous building on foot but simultaneously serves to impart a sense of a receding glacial temporality. Wang’s technique of layering found materials into distinct banded strata (of colours and textures) also grants the sizeable assemblage a geological aesthetic (see Fig. 4.6). Finally, on many occasions as we walked past these walls in the spring time small birds could be discovered nesting in the ventilation holes and porous trenches, once designed for another purpose in older bygone human structures. The sloping roofs on the peaks above had also greened and gone to seed, channelling and speaking back to the natural “architecture as mountain style” (Wang 2011). A living blanket of

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Fig. 4.5  Close-up time images

wild rhizome grasses also sprouted from the gaps in between the stacked detritus and piled fragments of historicity. These all speak of other entangled and incorporated territories, time-lines, and lines of flight that we unfortunately have no time or space to follow-up on here, other than to say that these multi-rhythmic ecological durations further contribute to the thickened and heterogeneous sensations of time emitted by the building’s complex multi-durational hybrid-image shi-nema.

Assembling a Playful Architectonic Cinema The importance of architecture, broken or otherwise, to the form and content of Jia’s Expo film is apparent from its opening image, which fades in from black (Fig. 4.7). It is a seated architectural lion or shı̄, centrally framed, as if staring out onto the wasted Shanghai street afore it. Here, Jia’s auteurial “eye of chai” style immediately becomes folded into the shı̄’s mediating point of view, as it gazes upon the inbetweenness of urban Shanghai laid low before it. The film thereafter sutures together different framings of the statue in a manner that distantly echoes Eisenstein’s

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Fig. 4.6  Stratified geological aesthetics

Fig. 4.7  Opening image of I Wish I Knew

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famous montage sequence of the awaking stone lions from Bronenosets Potemkin/Battleship Potemkin (1925). However, here the dialectical architectural montage highlights the larger lion first being polished by a migrant worker, before dialectically framing a close-up of the larger shı̄ overpowering and pinning down a smaller cub, which lies belly up and helpless beneath its paws (Fig. 4.8). While this potent poetic image speaks back to Eisenstein’s revolutionary cinema in a multitude of complex ways, the animated montage depicting two unequally matched beasts locked in playful combat thematically resonates with the uneven struggle between different politico- and ethico-aesthetic forces, or narrative systems, operating within Jia’s film. Which is to say, suggesting a toying struggle between official and unofficial accounts, macropolitical and micropolitical perspectives, the main melody and Jia’s minor in-dependent counter rhythm, and by extension the asymmetrical entanglement of movement- and time-­ image modalities within this hybrid-image form of architectonic shi-nema. In an early documentary sequence Jia embeds another symbolic image sequence that speaks to attentive viewers of his in-dependent art method. This captures an older generation of locals playing a game of mahjong: commonly thought of as a game of observation and strategy, luck and tactics, memory and reaction, teamwork and contingency. One woman captured by Jia’s camera perceives the surreptitious recording of their game and beckons the camera operator inside. Thereafter, the film frames the Shanghai players’ disembodied hands actively in-mixing and re-­ shuffling the mahjong tiles (Fig. 4.9). Presently, Jia edits in shots of the

Fig. 4.8  The larger lion overpowering a smaller cub

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Fig. 4.9  Arrangements of mahjong tiles

players re-arranging their tiles into meaningful and communicative columns and rows. This early shot arguably offers the director another potent material metaphor for his own ludic and architectonic film-making schema, something that also diagrammatically or metaphorically resonates with and recalls Wang’s wapan arrangements of symbolic keystones within his communicative museum walls. For, tellingly, in the game of mahjong, the symbols embossed on a player’s dominoes not only represent things but also correspond to agential functions that allow the holders to “do things.” In its opening sequences, then, I Wish I Knew highlights Jia’s own obsessions with breaking down, re-mixing, building up and playfully re-­ arranging agential blocks and also engaging in a game or competition with his viewers and commissioners. Soon after, the film’s own formal arrangement and composition illustrate that it too is a contingent assortment of cine-blocks and temporal-­ tiles. This recalls the architectonic principle Jia previously employed in Er shi si cheng ji/24 City (2008)—a film meticulously composed of “tableaux vivants” and docu-fiction blocs punctuated with “narrative ellipses” and “intertextual palimpsests” (Deppman 2015, p. 198). For I Wish I Knew, however, Jia intensifies these drives by constellating fragments wrestled from eleven different Shanghai films, seventeen new documentary interviews (recording the stories and memories of different generations of Shanghai residents) and a series of staged ghostly tableaux capturing Zhao wandering through freshly demolished neighbourhoods. These very curational and museographic principles lead critics such as Dudley Andrew and

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Xu Jing to read the film as unleashing “a mosaic of Shanghai’s past” that, unlike “the smooth picture [of history] provided so unproblematically in textbooks,” does not attempt to hide the city’s (and the nation’s by extension) “jagged edges and contradictions” (Andrew and Xu 2011, p. 28). Here, we can recognise what we might call Jia’s wapan architechtonic style of blocking together his film formally building up a pluralistic and polyphonic image of the city’s fractured and riven history—with the individual cinematic fragments (like Wang’s urban detritus) in assemblage building up a complex multiperspectival psychogeographic view of events that now linger on the withering edges of living memory: including stories from the end of the Qing dynasty, the anti-Japanese war, the founding of the People’s Republic, the Cultural Revolution and China’s postsocialist embrace of global capitalism. By montaging these heteroclite blocks together, though, Jia like Wang also encourages his viewers’ attention to gradually move towards the gaps, fractures and cracks that exist in between these various historical-filmic fragments, thereby introducing complex mental relations into the image that push perception from the actual towards the virtual, the visible towards the invisible, the seen towards the unseen and the thought towards the unthought. To illustrate how such shi-nematic effects are produced, we can turn to Jia’s nesting of various repurposed images (and after-images) of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s and Lou Ye’s films into his own farrago project; these being emblematic cine-fragments that provide us with concrete examples of actual film images whose position and arrangements help generate and unleash virtual images through a shi-like process of disposition.

Cracked Cine-Crystals To begin with we might note how scenes from Hou’s nineteenth-century period drama Flowers of Shanghai (1998) are initially introduced into Jia’s film as a form of prosthetic cinematic memory, furnishing I Wish I Knew with an authentic-seeming historical image of an already demolished Qing-era Shanghai cityscape. Later, Jia also embeds a newly recorded interview with Hou, the film’s director, who discusses his memories of making this pre-millennial Shanghai masterpiece. However, in this interview cine-literate viewers might also become vaguely aware of another meta-cinematic homage to yet another of Hou’s films becoming kaleidoscopically enfolded into I Wish I Knew. For, as Andrew and Xu note, Hou here “speaks about his Shanghai film while sitting on a train that opens his

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earlier Dust in the Wind (1987),” meaning that “a noted film-maker speaks from within the set of one of his own films about another of his films that Jia Zhangke has inserted inside the one we are watching” (Andrew and Xu 2011, 31). This kaleidoscopic and fractalactic conflation of actual and virtual, past and present, constitutes another example of what Deleuze calls a “crystal image,” not least because the work of the Taiwanese auteur Hou—famous for his own fractured “mosaic style” of time-image filmmaking (Chen 2014)—generates intricate overlapping patterns of perception and recollection, foregrounding and regress, within Jia’s crystalline film. It ultimately opens up a shimmering reflective cinematic environment composed of ever-regressing interfacing networks of actual and virtual, real and imaginary, cinematic images and time-lines. In this gesture Jia also subtly introduces and virtually evokes the unrepresentable (in official PRC cinema) geopolitical fracture between Taiwan and the PRC, in a manner that is difficult to actually pin point for Chinese censors, something that here only emerges through the shi-nematic atmosphere generated by the constellated film(s) (and films within the films). The embedding of another two film images featuring different Shanghai river sequences—from a foreign and a homegrown Urban Generation filmmaker respectively—helps engender a comparable synaptic effect. Here, Jia constellates a documentary river-boat sequence recoded by Michelangelo Antonioni (for his ill-fated Chung Kuo, Cina (1973), which is itself a controversial “political” cinema of inbetweenness, see e.g. King 2010, pp.  110–129) with the crackpot opening of Lou’s underground docudrama Su Zhou he/Suzhou River (2000) (a film that constitutes one of the PRC’s first autodidactic examples of homegrown crystal-image filmmaking, see e.g. Fleming 2014b). The relational attraction engineered between these two implanted Shanghai film fragments initially highlights how Lou’s millennial aesthetic recalls and homages the Italian director’s earlier documentary film. Thereafter Jia allows these different films and filmmakers to move into a complex palimpsestual relationship with his own eye of chai style. How? Suzhou River, like I Wish I Knew, is first and foremost a peculiar “city-­ symphony” (Hoberman 2000). The former is an oneiric film about doubles and mistaken identities, which has also aptly been described as a “transformative imitation” or Chinese detournement of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) (see Silbergeld 2004, pp. 1–17). Tellingly, Jia here repurposes Lou’s febrile river-ride opening, which dramatically blends

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on-the-­spot documentary realism and subjective expressionistic modes courtesy of an unreliable first-person videographer-narrator, whose body and camera drift downstream bearing witness to the latest forms of urban life unfolding along the millennial Suzhou riverbanks. This quoted passage, full of abrupt cuts and jumpy editing leaps, offers I Wish I Knew a dark and cracked crystal image whose own style and aesthetic evoke the broader Urban Generation temperament or world view. Indeed, Lou here captures the river’s semi-reflective surface, strewn with drifting trash, which bobs beneath a polluted industrial skyline, as the video camera’s gaze restlessly lurches in paranoid pans and tilts between green water, slimy boats and ruined urban landmarks. The narrator, voiced by Lou himself here, intones: “There’s a century-worth of stories here, and rubbish, which makes it the filthiest river.” Workers pounding their hammers and breaking apart old socialist factories are captured on the left bank. They are breaking these architectural structures down in a manner that anticipates how Lou’s film (and Jia’s which embeds it, and by extension the wider Urban Generation movement to which both directors have been associated) concomitantly breaks down and breaks apart Chinese action-image storytelling conventions. Through such techniques, Lou’s potent millennial fragment indexes and signals different forms of psychogeographical breakdown (mental, material, cinematic) that point to a poetic cinema of inbetweenness. As if amplifying these ideas through the fragment’s audio track, Fleming elsewhere notes how this atmospheric sequence is also: audibly enveloped by distorted sounds of destruction that open up a gap between sound and image, transforming the indexical traces into psychological images with a nightmarish quality. (2014b, p. 143)

Tellingly, moments after this fissured opening passes on-screen, I Wish I Knew’s own filmmaking style and technique begins to transformatively imitate, or become pathologically infected by, Suzhou River’s distinctive stylistic. Indeed, Jia’s own docu-drama filmmaking suddenly begins mirroring Lou’s delirious movements of frame, as his camera re-takes the same boat trip down the same stretch of river, albeit a decade or so later. For Andrews and Xu, Jia’s motific “replication by a kind of superimposition” helps illuminate “the great ‘improvements’ that have taken place along the river in the past decade” (2011, p. 31). While not disputing such views, we might additionally see how this technique of grouping together,

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overlapping and aligning these various cinematic space-time blocks (Antonioni’s, Lou’s and Jia’s river-rides) also helps gesture towards  the gaps, cuts and memory holes located in between these fragments of Shanghai cinematicity. In such vertiginous gestures we might also recognise how Jia, like the time-image wapan tiler Wang, or indeed a Shanghai mahjong player, gathers together heterogeneous blocks into contingent groups and runs, so that under the right circumstances, and at some future moment, they might suddenly discharge, or do things, to the various actors, agents and players involved.

Conclusions This chapter illustrated how the significant crystal-image form and ludic temporal dispositions of Wang’s and Jia’s in-dependent urban shi-nema generated charged affective atmospheres that foster latent potentials for the innervation of feeling and thought. That is, the mixed bag film and building (that are also heavily pregnant with virtual images) offer the conditions for a potential synaptic discharge if viewers/visitors grant them an attenuated corporeal intellection. What is more, by rhythmically and affectively gesturing towards the gaps, holes and broken edges of history, these minoritarian masterpieces work to interfere with, and deterritorialise, the otherwise smooth and familiar melody of China’s dominant or majoritarian political leitmotif.

Notes 1. Even before our era of animated skyscrapers and architectural projection mappings, much was written about the intermedia connections and imminglings criss-crossing the worlds of architecture and film. For example, beyond concrete discussions of auditorium comportments, screening room layouts, the arrangement of the audio-visual apparatuses, the aspects of picture houses and the flows of human traffic through smooth (non-place) megaplexes, in film theory the principles behind the cinematic medium have been linked to the machinated modernist architecture of abattoirs and factories, which had bequeathed important pedagogical lessons regarding the rationalised and scientific production processes of commercial film studios. Architecture and cinema had also been compared as technical industries: in that the expensive (and often commissioned) products of these worlds each demanded innumerable stages of research and development, alongside the

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timely collaborations and input of myriad teams of investors, third-party contractors, craftsmen, lawyers, environmental consultants and their likes. 2. Our use of the term “detour” throughout this book derives from the notion of détournement, a critical and dialectical manoeuvre popularised by Guy Debord and the Letterist International, and later the Situationist International. Détournnement is a term often translated as “deflection,” “diversion,” “detour,” “hijack,” “misuse,” or “reroute” in English. In thesis 208 of Society of the Spectacle (1984), Debord argues that détournement must appear “‘in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any inherent or definitive certainty.”’ Elsewhere, in the 1956 essay “‘A Users Guide to Detournement”’ co-authored with Gil J. Wolman, the procedure is described it in terms of a “‘mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, [which supersede] the original elements”’ to produce a “‘synthetic organisation of greater efficacy”’ (1956, p. 15). Our use of the term “detour” throughout aims to evoke this sense of hijacking and deflecting original meaning. 3. This “seasick/unbalanced” feeling is comparable to one we have only encountered moving through the Libeskind Building and its Garden of Exile, which frames the Jewish Museum in Berlin. And for its unsettling affects/effects, the building has also been utilised as an affective and load-­ bearing background in Chen Kaige’s 2012 contemporary thriller Sou suo/Caught in the Web (and more on which in Chap. 5).

References Andrew, D., & Xu, J. (2011). The Lion’s Gaze: Truth and Legend in I Wish I Knew. Film Criticism, 36(1), 24–43. Barker, J.  M. (2009a). The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkley: University of California Press. Barker, J.  M. (2009b). Neither Here nor There: Synaesthesia and the Cosmic Zoom. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 7(3), 311–324. Basulto, D. (2012, February 27). Wang Shu by Alejandro Averna. Arch Daily. Retrieved February 27, 2020, from http://www.archdaily.com/211958/ wang-shu-by-alejandroaravena/. Bell, C. (1995). Art. In A.  Neill & A.  Ridley (Eds.), The Philosophy Of Art: Readings Ancient And Modern. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Berry, C. (2007). Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism. In Z. Zhang (Ed.), The Urban Generation (pp. 115–133). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Berry, C. (2014). China’s iGeneration: From Film Studies to Screen Studies. In M. D. Johnson et al. (Eds.), China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century (pp. vii–x). New  York and London: Bloomsbury. Bordeleau, E. (2013). Jia Zhangke’s Still Life: Destruction as Intercession. Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy, 3, 26–29. Brown, M. S., & O’Brien, D. (2019). Defining the Right Path: Aligning Islam with Chinese Socialist Core Values at Ningbo’s Moon Lake Mosque. Asian Ethnicity. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2019.1636637. Bruno, G. (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso. Buchanan, I. (2015). Assemblage Theory and Its Discontents. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 382–392. Chen, Y.-H. (2014). Deleuze and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ‘Mosaic’ in Good Men, Good Women (1995). Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 8(2), 160–171. Cilento, K. (2012, February 28). The Local Architect Wang Shu. Arch Daily. Retrieved October 10, 2015, from http://www.archdaily.com/212424/ the-local-architect-wangshu/. Debord, G., & Wolman, G. J. (2007). A Users Guide to Detournment. In K. Knabb, (Ed.), Situationist International Anthology (pp. 14–20). Berkley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets. Deleuze, G. (2004). Difference and Repetition (P.  Patton, Trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2005b). Cinema 2: The Time-Image (H.  Tomlinson & R.  Galeta, Trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2011). What Is Philosophy? (H.  Tomlinson & G. Burchill, Trans.). London: Verso. Deppman, H. (2015). Reading Docufiction: Jia Zhangke’s 24 City. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 8(3), 188–208. Dickie, M. (2012, May 25). China’s Star Architect Blasts Demolition Culture. Financial Times. Retrieved November 5, 2015, from www.ft.com/cms/ s/0/5ddc9008-a586-11e1-a77b-00144feabdc0.html. Donaldson, L.  F. (2009). Surface Contact: Film Design as an Exchange of Meaning. Film-Philosophy, 22(2), 203–221. Eisenstein, S.  M. (1989). Montage and Architecture. Assemblage, 10(December), 111–131. Fleming, D. H. (2013). The Bicycle Thieves of Rome and Beijing: Deleuze and (Si)neo-Realist Time-Images? In J. Gao & P. Patton (Eds.), Deleuze in China: Proceedings of the 2012 Kaifeng International Deleuze Conference (pp. 136–149). Henan: Henan University Press. Fleming, D. H. (2014a). Deleuze, the ‘(Si)neo-realist’ Break, and the Emergence of Chinese Any-now(here)-Spaces. Deleuze Studies, 8(4), 509–541.

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Fleming, D.  H. (2014b). The Creative Evolution and Crystallisation of the ‘Bastard Line’: Drifting from the Rive Gauche into Suzhou River. Journal of Chinese Cinemas Special Issue: Deleuze & Chinese Cinemas, 8(2), 135–147. Fleming, D. H. (2019). Third-Culture Huàllywood: Or, ‘Chimerica’ the Cinematic Return. Transnational Screens, 10(3), 184–200. Fleming, D. H., & Indelicato, M. (2019). On Transnational Chinese Cinema(s), Hegemony, and Huallywood(s). Transnational Screens, 10(3), 137–147. Foucault, M. (1984). Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 5: 46–49. Retrieved February 21, 2020, from https://foucault. info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en/. Goodman, N. (1985). How Buildings Mean. Critical Inquiry, 11(4), 642–653. Greenspan, A. (2014). Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoberman, J. (2000, November 7). Eternal Return. The Village Voice. Retrieved February 21, 2020, from http://www.villagevoice.com/2000-11-07/film/ eternal-return/. Holtmeier, M. A. (2014). The Wanderings of Jia Zhangke: Pre-hodological Space and Aimless Youths in Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 8(2), 148–159. Jacobson, C. (2014). New Museums in China. New  York: Princeton Architectural Press. Jaffee, V. (2006). ‘Every Man a Star’: The Ambivalent Cult of Amateur Art in New Chinese Documentaries. In P. Pickowicz & Y. Zhang (Eds.), From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (pp. 77–108). New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. Jia, Z. (2010). Speaking of ‘The Sixth Generation’: I Don’t Believe That You Can Predict Our Ending. dGeneratefilms. Retrieved December 20, 2015, from http://dgeneratefilms.com/academia/52full-translation-of-jia-zhangkesessay-on-sixth-generation-cinema-nowavailable/. Jullien, F. (1995). The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China. New York: Zone Books. Khoo, O. (2019). Another Day at The Office: Huallywood Co-productions, Verticality, and the Project of a Comparative Film Studies. Transnational Screens, 10(3), 170–183. King, H. (2010). Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema and the Enigmatic Signifier. Durham: Duke University Press. Kmata01. (2012). Ningbo Tengtou Pavilion [Social_Responsive_Vernacular]. Retrieved from https://arch5541.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/ningbotengtou-pavilion-social_responsive_vernacular/. Li, D. L. (2016). Economy, Emotion and Ethics in Chinese Cinema: Globalization on Speed. London and New York: Routledge.

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Lin, X. (2010). Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-Garde Art and Independent Cinema. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Lu, T. (2006). Trapped Freedom and Localized Globalism. In P.  Pickowicz & Y. Zhang (Eds.), From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (pp.  123–142). New  York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. Ma, J. (2010). Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Mackenzie, I., & Porter, R. (2011). Dramatizing the Political: Deleuze and Guattari. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Martin-Jones, D. (2006). Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Martin-Jones, D. (2011). Deleuze and World Cinemas. London: Continuum. Martin-Jones, D., & Fleming, D.  H. (2014). Deleuze and Chinese Cinemas. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 8(2), 93–98. McGrath, J. (2007). The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realist to Transnational Aesthetic. In Z. Zhang (Ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (pp. 81–113). Durham: Duke University Press. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Mumford, L. (1970). The Culture of Cities. San Diego, NY, London: HBJ Book. O’Sullivan, S. (2006). Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation. London: Palgrave. Orwell, G. (1983). 1984. New York: Harcourt. Pasternack, A. (2009, July 7). Chinese History Museum Literally Recycled from History. Treehugger. Retrieved February 21, 2020, from https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/chinese-history-museum-literally-recycled-from-history.html. Phillips, J. (2006). Agencement/Assemblage. Theory Culture & Society, 23(2/3), 108–109. Pickowicz, P. G. (2006). Preface & Social and Political Dynamics of Underground Filmmaking in China. In P. Pickowicz & Y. Zhang (Eds.), From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (pp. 1–22). New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. Silbergeld, J. (2004). Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China’s Moral Voice. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Tolstoy, L. (1995). What Is Art? In A. Neill & A. Ridley (Eds.), The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern. New York: McGraw-Hill. Tong, J. (2003). Chungking Express. In C. Berry (Ed.), Chinese Films in Focus (pp. 47–55). London: BFI.

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Virilio, P. (2002). The Overexposed City. In G. Bridge & S. Watson (Eds.), The Blackwell City Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Wang, S. (2011). Geometry and Narrative of Natural Form. Kenzo Tange Lecture Delivered at Harvard GSD. Retrieved June 2018, from https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Qq8sD7aGH2M. Wise, J. M. (2011). Assemblage. In C. J. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts (pp. 91–101). Durham: Acumen. Wong, K. (2005). Technoscience Culture, Embodiment and Wuda Pian. In M. Morris et al. (Eds.), Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (pp. 267–286). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Xiao, J. (2011). The Quest for Memory: Documentary and Fiction in Jia Zhangke’s Films. Senses of Cinema, 59(June). Yang, G. O. (2012). The Infinite Spontaneity of Tradition. The Pritzker Architecture Prize. Retrieved February 6, 2020, from http://www.pritzkerprize. com/2012/essay. Yau, K.-F. (2001). Cinema 3: Towards a ‘Minor Hong Kong Cinema’. Cultural Studies, 15(3/4), 543–563. Zhang, Z. 2007. Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of ‘Transformation’ (Zhuanxing). In The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Z. Zhang. 1-46. Durham: Duke University Press. Zhang, X. (2011). Market Socialism and Its Discontent: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Narrative of China’s Transition in the Age of Global Capital. In J.  Kapur & K. W. Wagner (Eds.), Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique (pp. 135–156). New York: Routledge.

Filmography Bronenosets Potemkin/Battleship Potemkin. Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein. 1925. Chung Kuo-Cina. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. 1973. Er shi si cheng ji/24 City. Directed by Zhangke Jia. 2008. Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew. Directed by Zhangke Jia. 2010. Hai shang hua/Flowers of Shanghai. Directed by Hsiao-hsien Hou. 1998. Liàn liàn fengchén/Dust in the Wind. Directed by Hsiao-hsien Hou. 1987. Ren xiao yao/Unknown Pleasures. Directed by Zhangke Jia. 2002. San xia hao ren/Still Life. Directed by Zhangke Jia. 2006. Shije/The World. Directed by Zhangke Jia. 2004. Su Zhou he/Suzhou River. Directed by Ye Lou. 2000. Vertigo, Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 1958. Xiao Wu/Pickpocket. Directed by Jia Zhangke. 1997. Zhantai/Platform. Directed by Zhangke Jia. 2000.

CHAPTER 5

Transnational Sci-Fi Shi-nema: Or, Diary Notes from “Westworld” Regarding Neoliberal Dulosis, “Academic” Automatons and the Franchised Post-historical University in the Era of Global “Excellence” Disneyland is authentic! Television and movies are real! America has created an ideal world from nothing and consecrated it in the cinema. —Baudrillard (2014, p. 24) The landscape in the World Park includes famous sights from all over the world. They’re not real, but still they can satisfy people’s longing for the world. They reflect the very strong curiosity of people in this country, and the interest they have in becoming a part of international culture. —Jia Zhangke in Jaffee (2006) [The Ningbo Campus of the University of Nottingham (UNNC)] provides a UK-style education, in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, systems, language and resources. The stated institutional intention is to provide its students with the “Nottingham experience” in China. —Quality Assurance Agency, UK (2012, p. 1)

The University of Nottingham’s second international campus in Ningbo China (UNNC) formulates the third shi-nematic assemblage we zoom in on. To detour1 its own marketing slogans, this constitutes the “first and best” example of the marketised expansion of post-cultural and post-­historical © The Author(s) 2020 D. H. Fleming, S. Harrison, Chinese Urban Shi-nema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_5

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Sino-foreign university education model currently doing trade in China, which is to say, the type of techno-cosmopolitan playground (see e.g. Clarke 2003, p. 79) that some commentators from education and applied linguistics have disparaged as being the “Disneyland model” of universities (see e.g. Readings 1997, p. 6) or “little more than an academic themepark” (Jenkins 2011, p. 933). The success of this Western franchise venture made UNNC a Western trailblazer for subsequent Sino-foreign educational models setting up shop in China—which now include the independent institution Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, the Sino-­ British joint degree programme Queen Mary, University of London and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, NYU Shanghai and the University of Southern California-China. Our experiences of working inside this particular shi-nematic arrangement permits us to toggle between different interleaving scales of assembly, ranging from UK higher education models (and the multinational corporates) that do trade on the global platform to the changing topology and functions of Chinese higher education, down to singular embodied classroom transactions and the subjective experiences of staff and students operating therein. In order to set up the context of our analysis, though, we might first turn to the types of cinema we feel compelled to hang this urban media alongside.

Sci fi and Simulacra Cinema/Shi-nema “Boy, have we got a vacation for you!” is the fictional slogan for Delos, the near-future amusement park in Michael Crichton’s 1973 science fiction adventure Westworld. Therein, guests fork out for a $1000-a-day immersive fantasy experience in one of three themed parks that are populated by humanoid replicants wearing the period costumes of Roman World, Medieval World or West World. Once inside, paying customers take part in an openworld cinema-like role-playing adventure experience, which permits them to fraternise, frolic, fight or fuck with Delos’ hi-tech androids. To its original 1970s audiences, Delos no doubt  signified something akin to a hyperreal futuristic interactive play park that might feasibly cater to the grown-up kids that were then vacationing with Mickey and his pals in California. Within the science fiction narrative, as is the case in the more recent 2016 HBO reboot,2 the “authentic” hyperreal experiences of life, sex and death serve to raise a raft of complex ethical and moral questions regarding media pedagogies, implanted desires and the shifting moral boundaries between reality and fantasy, authenticity and cinematicity, in an

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increasingly corporate-technocratic postmodern-cum-posthuman world. But why begin a chapter about Sino-foreign universities, pedagogy and the contemporary academic profession with a discussion of the Hollywood film Westworld? Our answer here is threefold. First and foremost, we begin this chapter with a discussion of Westworld because the concept of a western “play ground of techno-­cosmopolitanism” (Clarke 2003, p. 79)—where paying guests can interact with racial/radical others—is germane to the marketing of the latest wave of Western universities venturing into China’s higher education marketplace, and more specifically this Sino-alien (read transnational and transmedial) campus world with its proclaimed mission statement of offering Chinese students the “Nottingham Experience.” This idea was first touted when UNNC began marketing itself on China’s CCTV in 2005, courtesy of a message delivered by the then New Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair: advertising how the UK would sell “branded” and “Quality Controlled” British educational “excellence” to paying Chinese “customers” (the term used in the local staff’s “behavioural protocol” training literature in reference to students). This is a business model that would gradually come to encrust itself within a literal bricks and mortar(board) simulacra of an English university campus within Ningbo’s new education zone. In anticipation of discussions to come concerning our own role within this Western theme park, it becomes helpful to briefly consider Crichton’s original casting of Yul Brynner (who the internet movie database refers to as the “exotic leading man of American films”) as Westworld’s malfunctioning cyborg gunslinger. This detail highlights a savvy form of postmodern self-reflective pastiching that also helps to erect a backsliding image of mise-en-abyme, wherein Brynner appears to operate upon two different levels simultaneously—with his body image functioning concurrently as a “star” and draw for the Westworld movie and as a recognisable sign or “type” within the fictional (and always already film-like) Westworld theme park. Put simpler, Brynner appears to play his own star persona or self-­ image, surfacing as a posthuman android that appears self-identical with the iconic gunslinger character he previously embodied in the classic 1960s Western The Magnificent Seven (for which he adorned the same iconic black costume). Within the park Brynner surfaces as a fractal-form Brynner (a pattern that appears further fractalised when this droid-image appears in a simulated cameo-homage in the 2016 HBO reboot) or self-metaphor. Of particular relevance to this chapter, Brynner’s ethnically mutable star image and residual career baggage also became responsible for

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enfolding an affective dimension of existential otherness into his inhuman Westworld character. Which is to say, as an actor and star, Brynner embodied a palpable ethnic otherness that directors and scriptwriters played with in their scripted scenarios.3 Over and above content and themes, the second reason we draw on this Western film in this chapter is that until the 2019 release of Liu lang di qiu/The Wandering Earth, science fiction was ostensibly a missing film genre in mainland China. Or at least, post 1949 it was not generally sanctioned (or realistically funded) by the PRC’s state-sponsored film system, which looked unfavourably upon stories featuring “fantasy and mythical elements” and “false science” (see e.g. Jie Zhang 2014, pp.  40, 49).4 Chairman Mao would also ban the popular “Western-influenced” literary genre during the Cultural Revolution (see e.g. Liptak 2015). It is on account of this generic void within contemporary Chinese cinema that this chapter turns to a foreign science fiction film as a transnational shinematic counterpoint. However, if science fiction remains a missing genre during the period of study we undertake here, it is worth noting that various examples of contemporaneous Chinese film did begin to index and record the appearance of hyperreal architectural simulacra within the transforming socio-political landscape. These form another pertinent vector with our UNNC shi-nematic case study that we can momentarily linger on here. Jia Zhangke’s first overground Chinese film, Shije/The World (2004), for example, is set inside The World Park in Beijing, where guests encounter (in a manner that perhaps reifies our fractal diagramming) miniature replicas of famous architectural landmarks from around the globe—including the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower and London’s Houses of Parliament with its iconic clock tower (and more on which later). Jia’s expressive use of the park’s mise-en-scène and miniaturised global landmarks often consequently get discussed in terms of the director picking up on fresh tensions emerging between the global and the local at a moment when Beijing (and China by extension) began to (re)surface and rebrand itself as a prominent place within the integrated global economy (see e.g. Hilo 2007). It is also significant to this chapter that many critics thereafter began jerry-rigging the concepts and ideas of Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard to better read this postsocialist docudrama, noting how the director’s quasi-documentary images of the real theme park indexed the appearance of a new one-dimensional “culture of simulacrum,” wherein

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meaningful distinctions between the real and the false were becoming increasingly confused and blurred (see e.g. Hilo 2007).5 Elsewhere Fleming similarly links Jia’s use of simulacral spaces in Shije to the appearance of new international hotels and shopping malls—which were also emblematic of Capitalism’s Second Coming—across the broader corpus of Urban Generation films. Such phenomena there occassion a creative encounter between Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “any-space-­ whatever” (2005, p.  8)—a type of time-image space that typically leaves dislocated and disenfranchised urban characters unsure of how to move and act—and Marc Augé’s notion of the supermodern “non-place” (1995)— typified by highways, airports, malls and hotels emblematic of globalisation (that could essentially be found anywhere in the world). Through this conceptual encounter  Fleming describes  newly emerging forms of  Chinese “any-now(here)-spaces” (Fleming 2014, p. 527). In this chapter we detour and expand this concept to also account for the simulacral façades and corridors of UNNC’s “Trent Building”: a real 1:1 scale 3D facsimile of the University of Nottingham’s original 1927 “Classical Revival” (Grade II Listed Heritage Category and now-branded) Trent Building. Of course, recognition of the Nottingham building’s Classical Revival style highlights how the UNNC building is itself always already a copy of a copy that lacks an original and thus serves to emit a doubled down form of non-presence from the very core of the campus world (Fig. 5.1). Which is to say, the UNNC Trent Building signals what Jean-Luc Nancy refers to as the “abyss of representation”: constituting a regressive system wherein “a sign, as soon as it signifies, refers back to another sign, and their connection connects or refers to nothing (to nothing as a ‘thing’, a ‘presence,’ a ‘given’). Sign and sign and nothing—such is the rhythm” (Nancy in Nancy and Barrau 2015, p. 9). Worth highlighting here is how simular acoustic sounds and rhythms associated with this building’s tower also become strangely hollow and haunting. For, the chimes that hourly emanate from this facsimiled tower—although among the more occidental and exotic sounds echoing around the wider Ningbo screenscape (such as the socalled “Little Nottingham” village) and skyscrapers (including Manor Park and Bali Sunday)—are also not what they might innocently first seem to be. Indeed, the British bell that has rung from the tower of the UK’s Trent Building from around 1927 is categorically different from the inner working of the simulacral tower in China (see e.g. Curnock 2014). In point of fact, the Ningbo ringing is not actually made by an iron tongue licking the inside of a cast iron bell at all. Instead, and as is fitting to this chapter, the

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Fig. 5.1  Nottingham building’s Classical Revival style. (Source: https://www. nottingham.edu.cn/en/hr/job-opportunities/jobs.aspx)

UNNC bell noise is a digitally recorded sound effect that is pumped out from electric speakers mounted inside the otherwise hollow “belfry.” All this to say that, at the very heart of the UNNC campus world, a skeuomorphic sound near hourly emanates from within a simulacral tower that was itself always already a simulation of an earlier architectural style from somewhere else. Echoes here then of Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s description of simulation as being “a copy which has no prototype, the imitation of something that does not exist, and has never existed except than in the simulator’s mind” (2015, p. 188). The UNNC Trent Building clearly betrays its own fractalatic cinematicity here: a notion that has arguably been harnessed and repackaged as a form of concrete film-thought in Chen Kaige’s 2012 film Sou suo/Caught in the Web, which purposely extracts an image of the UNNC Trent Building and puts it to use as part of the film’s supersaturated hyperreal mise-en-scène. Which is to say, the superficial building is deemed a communicative and signaletic backdrop for a film that tackles head-on the increased blurring of fact and fiction, truth and lies, illusion and reality in contemporary postsocialist urban China (Fig. 5.2, see also Fleming 2011).

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Fig. 5.2  Scene from Sou suo featuring the UNNC Trent Building

Outwith the building’s imagistic repurposing in Sou suo, though, this chapter zooms in to argue that the real UNNC campus always already indexes a form of shi-nematicity emblematic of the globalising times. We also complement this with a vertiginous back-track that sets out a broader historical background accounting for the symptomatic appearance of this transnational arrangement. All the while working to expose the multiscalar effects and affects of such phenomena, we interweave auto-ethnographic and ficto-critical observations that illustrate how the obtaining practices and policies at work within these spaces—emblematic of UK education in the era of global excellence—impact the lived realities of both the paid international staff and the paying Chinese customers/students who interact and transact in this otherworldly science fictional setting. In brief, it is not just the look and sound of the simulacral UNNC tower that does not ring entirely true on this campus we will argue, for alarmingly we will go on to recount experiences that suggest that some students and staff—us included—were also sometimes encouraged only to sound and perform as if real academics. “Boy, have we got an education for you!”

Notes from Westworld: (Video) Casting Call A campus in China advertising otherworldly experiences for students requires otherworldly people. Using our case study approach, and inspired by auto-ethnographic narratives (e.g. Scott 2014), we first offer original perspectives on two people’s palimpsestual memories of the recruitment process through which two “aliens” (as we were known to China’s

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immigration bureau) were invited to the Nottingham UK mother school, where upon arrival, through the affordances of digital technologies, we were subsequently beamed into the satellite campus for our interviews for lectureship positions at the UNNC. Each of us recall entering the Classical Revival style Trent Building and reporting to our designated contact point, before being shown to an interview antechamber, of sorts, by a kind member of the administration team, who also briefed us on the video conference interview protocol. We would soon be interviewed by a panel located in Ningbo China, we were told, who existed in a different time zone (there it was now early evening). We were also informed that there would be “real” people actually present in the interview room too, who would introduce themselves. However, during the proceedings, we should try our best to avoid making eye contact with them and instead focus on the camera on the top of the screen. A faculty member greeted us and then led us down the hall into the interview studio. One of us awkwardly crossed paths with the previous interviewee—another would-be alien. The room contained several seats, an arrangement that composited into a rectangular table, which had a single-use plastic bottle of water and a single-use plastic cup sat on it next to an empty plastic chair. Although the window blinds had all been drawn shut, natural daylight diffused into the blinkered room. Along the table’s right flank sat three other bodies. These were members of what we would later come to call the “mother ship faculty.” They greeted us with sociable faces, and continued shuffling through handfuls of information. Once we were seated, they introduced themselves in turn, before our attention was directed to the large flat screen at the far end of the table, which was mounted on wheeled stilts. This enframed a further panel of bodies inside a conference room, that we would later learn was located on the third floor of the copied UNNC version of the resuscitated Classical Revival Trent Building (but then called the Administration Building) on the satellite campus. From a sedentary position in the UK the flat interview screen looms just above eye level. The main image framed within the screen is captured by another camera that looks down upon the bodies composing the UNNC panel—a mediated arrangement that produces an unusual geometry of angles which rise and fall between interviewers and interviewee and enfolds a marked difference in lighting qualia between the two spaces. On the darker side of the arrangement sat the then UNNC Head of School and at least one other high-ranking member of staff. Also embedded in

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the same screen, hovering in the top right hand corner, was a small screen-­ within-­the-screen wherein our own self-images were replicated and rendered (as per a Skype call), uncomfortably relaying our own speech, gestures and postures with a slight temporal lag and skewed optical geometry that required sensorimotor adaptations (while increasing the alienness of the experience), as we self-consciously perceived our past selves being projected into a potentially Chinese future.6 On being cued, we delivered a pre-prepared presentation on our research plans from notes, before taking a series of generic questions from the images on the flip side of the screen: “Why UNNC?”; “How do you anticipate coping with the culture shock of China?”; “Describe how your teaching might be adaptable to different cultural contexts and student needs?”; “How might your research adapt to being in China?” Beyond these shared and presumably standardised questions, we recall experiences unique to each of the panels. One of us remembers a Chinese woman unexpectedly entering the screenscene from the right of frame carrying a tray with a teapot and handle-less cups. These were laid out and filled in silence before the panel, before she silently retreated. The woman’s gestures, clothing and demeanour pricked him, and stuck out afterwards as the most memorable moment of the interview. For this was the only actual Chinese actor, props and gestures included in the scenario. The other remembers an unexpected question from the Head of School, who having listened to the presentation of research, sought reassurance that the candidate also knew “how to fill in an Excel form”—this being a requisite skill for the administrative role of Exams Officer, which the chosen candidate was to fulfil for the first three years of appointment. After the conclusion of the tele-interview, the fleshy faculty present in the UK Trent Building asked a few more follow-up questions about funding, then invited our questions, before showing us out of the room. Job offers were made to both candidates, who subsequently shipped their belongings to Shanghai and began preparing for a new life as employees at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China—a modern machine for living that likely could not have been conceived in another historical era.

Western History in Three Acts, Ages or Concepts In What Is Philosophy? (2011), Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari maintain that there have been three distinct eras of the concept or thought: formulating the encyclopaedia, pedagogy and commercial professional training.

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Witnessing the rise of the latter in lockstep with new forms of modulating control society—associated with advanced capitalist logic, computer technology and globalisation—they argue that only pedagogy can “safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third,” which marks “an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism” (Deleuze and Guattari 2011, p. 12). Writing elsewhere, Deleuze also argued that all the enclosed disciplinary spaces—family, hospital, factory, prison, barracks and we here add university—were in crisis, gradually coming to operate under a new abstract diagram of corporate control (1997). Thus, as sure as the archaeologist of knowledge and power, Michel Foucault, had observed Sovereign societies being succeeded by modernity’s Disciplinary societies, Deleuze maintained that these in turn were now becoming replaced by newer forms of Control society, which desired to produce new forms of “dividual” (a being essentially divided against others—“every man for himself”—and themselves from within—“I could perform better, look better, get more training”) that would endlessly anticipate and adapt to a ceaselessly mutating and modulating logic. Here, the three major ages of Western society—sovereign, disciplinary, control—neatly dovetail with Deleuze and Guattari’s three eras of the concept—encyclopaedia, pedagogy, professional development. Writing in and about the Western university around the same time, Bill Readings commented that (what he calls) the dawning “postmodern” era had borne witness to a radical change, or more precisely ruin, of the university as we historically knew it (1997, p.  6). Like Deleuze and Guattari, in The University in Ruins Readings also identifies three distinct eras or abstract phases that education and thought had passed through, which he renders as the ages of Reason, Culture and Excellence respectively (1997, p. 14). For Readings, this latest phase-transition clearly threatened thought and pedagogy with a veritable disaster, as the modern university uncritically transformed from a cultural institution (and arm of the state apparatus) into yet another form of “bureaucratically organized and relatively autonomous consumer-oriented corporation” (1997, p. 3). The modern era of global market logic here leads to the emergence of new forms of “posthistorical” university, or, what we might call after David B.  Clarke, the postmodern university in its fractal form. Readings’ early observations and diagnosis were based on a series of slick publicity brochures and supra-institutional mission statements that, irrespective of place, all seemed to share two distinct features. (1) All

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universities of excellence claimed that “theirs is a unique educational institution,” before going on to (2) “describe this uniqueness in exactly the same way” (1997, p. 12). Through these, Readings pinpointed how education had been reimagined or re-imaged as another transactable commodity, meaning knowledge itself became “a principal economic currency” (Tonna 2007). The end result would be the post-cultural, post-national and post-­historical university that began operating on (and thus desiring to produce) “codes,” “quotas” and “outputs,” which could also be linked to a supra-institutional managerial logic of control—an operating system that began to (re)determine and (re)define what university education was, as is clearly spelled out in this oft-quoted passage from Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion: We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. (2009, n.p.)7

Riffing on such ideas, we hereafter posit that UNNC exemplifies a post-­ cultural form of transnational, transmedial and transactional educational franchise, constituting another privileged example of a modern Ningbonese machine for living that situates itself in between two different locals (Nottingham-Ningbo) within an integrated global matrix. Linked to which, if one wends their way through the maze of corridors in the UNNC simulacral Trent Building today, on the fourth floor corridors in the structure’s West wing one can encounter an image of the then New Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair shaking hands with gowned Nottingham professors. If one thereafter moves to the plush red and gold International Conference Centre opposite the provost’s domestic island residence, they may in turn find—amongst all the pictures hung there of past students, deans, dignitaries and sponsors—a frozen portrait of John Prescott (Fig.  5.3), the then New Labour Deputy Prime Minister. This was taken during his earth breaking visit to the new campus site in 2006. Semiotically speaking, then, it might appear that New Labour are intra-­ actively part of the bricks and mortar of this private “Cool Britannia”

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Fig. 5.3  “Two Jags” (later “Two Jabs”) Prescott at UNNC

endeavour—and thus formulate a potent psychogeographic detail that we might use to motivate a form of shi-nematic flashback.

Back to the Future (of Cool Britannia) In the early 1990s Western universities and other higher education institutions (HEIs) (predominantly in the UK, US, Australia and Canada) began to be economised and opened up to so-called “free market” forces. By 1996 the then chancellor of the University of Nottingham, Ron Dearing, was commissioned to produce a “twenty-year plan” exploring the future (science fictional?) funding needs of British education. In 1997 the final document was delivered to education secretary of the time, David Blunkett, from the incumbent New Labour government.8 Among other things, this recommended the implementation of means-tested tuition fees within the UK, an idea latched onto in the New Labour response entitled “Higher Education in the 21st Century,” which announced a plan to implement a £1000 means-tested annual tuition fee (with lower income

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families still qualifying for free tuition), which then represented around one quarter of the cost of a university course. Dovetailing with this new “Third Way” for education in the UK was the tail end of the “Cool Britannia” wave (with deliberate and disturbing echoes of an earlier era of colonial proto-globalisation), and whose global manifestations had helped a new generation of artistic and culture industry types to do great business on the home front (such as London’s new Globe theatre) and the global stage (with filmmakers like Danny Boyle and pop acts like the Spice Girls proving globally popular). It was in this broader atmosphere that in 1999 the University of Nottingham’s Business School produced a prospective research paper entitled “The Rise and Rise of the Corporate University” (Prince and Beaver 1999), which explored “the development of an increasingly sophisticated corporate university model” (Prince and Beaver 1999, p. 21). This varient version of the business model that Readings had warned of saw US students being reimagined by university executives as paying “consumers”—as opposed to proud meritocratic members of a cultural or collegial community—who could purchase skill sets from a post-national techno-bureaucratic service provider. And would also increasingly become squeezed for cash at every turn, including by being encouraged to purchase their university’s hollow-­ branded “signs of symbolic belonging”—most recognisable today as US-style logo-encrusted baseball hats, hoodies and desk items (Readings 1997 p. 10; see also Fig. 5.4). In this context it is interesting to note how the Nottingham paper’s assessment of future market prospects also took time to temper a warning about the changes such models encoded for the everyday running of universities. For, in its brief foray into the past workings and future potentials of these lucrative private education models, Prince and Beaver note that beside there being clear “competitive advantages” in pursuing the corporate model of operations, such switches often resulted in technological and financial considerations dominating “boardroom decision-making” at the expense of “the intellectual and human capital issues” (Prince and Beaver 1999, p.  23). Through its subtle social Darwinian (with apologies to Darwin) discussion of advantages, Prince and Beaver finally outlay three main benefits the corporate university model offers over its earlier (historical or public) manifestations. These are (1) that corporate universities tend to excel at reinforcing and perpetuating certain behaviours, as could be evidenced by the Disneyland and Federal Express models; (2) that corporate universities offer useful sites for managing change and preparing for

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Fig. 5.4  University branded materials at UNNC. (Screen capture from online store: https://h5.sosho.cn/shop/offer/list.html?mall_id=168)

strategic alterations and (3) that corporate universities become useful ventures for helping drive and (re)shape global organisations.9 One year after Prince and Beaver’s paper was published, the University of Nottingham began building its first “franchised branch” in Malaysia (the idea having been floated as early as 1992): UNMC (University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus). This venture is now majority owned by Boustead Holdings Sdn Bhd and, as Wikipedia currently renders it, is “being run like a company” (Wikipedia.org 2019). In 2004 Nottingham would thereafter enter into partnership and collaboration with China’s Wanli Education Group (WEG) in order to open its second overseas campus in Ningbo, the port city that 160 years earlier was commandeered by British forces during the Opium War and subsequently forced open to international trade through the Treaty of Nanjing (Lovell 2012)—a history that for many serves to problematise the building of an “English only” university campus in Ningbo, replete with its multiple symbols and signs of a British elsewhere.

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Consider here that, in his engagement with the Chinese documentary Fengkuang yingyu/Crazy English (1999)—a film following the mass language lessons of the fanatical entrepreneurial language guru Li Yang, whose mission was nothing less than to “reform the Chinese personality” and “convert a billion Chinese into an English-speaking folk”—David Leiwei Li notes that it becomes incumbent upon us to recognise the coextensive spread of English and global capitalism: with the former being the language of the latter (see also Blommaert 2012). For Li, the current and persisting desire to produce English-speaking Chinese business graduates should be read in this broader colonial framework, wherein the “Anglophonic yet non-Anglo subject of capitalism is not a novel idea but the abortive dream of an earlier British imperialism in Capital’s First Coming” (Li 2016, p. 67). Such perspectives are very much in line with the sociolinguistic history of English in China retraced by Kingsley Bolton, which likewise expose how drives to popularise English in China should be politically viewed as “modernity at work” (Bolton 2002, p. 196). UNNC, and particularly its largest school, NUBS (Nottingham University Business School)—whose large induction lectures yearly involve group chanting and team bonding exercises that vividly  recall images of Li Yang cheer leading football stadiums full of Chinese people to shout the English mantras of homo economicus (Li 2016, pp. 59–60; Bolton 2002)—might here be seen as production factories for anglophone neoliberal subjects and semiocapitalist workers. From a similar vantage, others have complained that the simulacral architectonics of the UNNC campus are aesthetically and semiotically troubling. Michael Shattock, for example, notes that the campus’s appearance, if not imperial, at least appears “counter-cultural, in the long term” (in Fazackerley and Worthington 2007, p. 19). Not least because, as discussed, in the centre of the campus stands an architectural copy of Nottingham’s Trent Building, the campus’s most iconic (branded) landmark (which students and guests use as a “foreign” background for all forms of film or selfie opportunity) and home of the provost, the party officials, the Schools of International Communications, Education, English, and NUBS. No doubt, this clock tower and bell can draw historically uncomfortable resonances with a British colonial past, which employed clocks and towers as key media and signs of their imposition of power. For, among others, Lewis Mumford reminds us that clocks were not only a prime mover and shaker in the technological realm but also the fundamental

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machine that inculcated Western modernity and global conquest. Not only because clocks are media designed to regulate movements and synchronise actions, but because they also served to  globally  regulate the flows of people, money and goods (Mumford 2010, p.14ff, as we will see in the case of the delivery of teaching and Starbucks coffee, to be presented later). Or again, as J. D. Peters comments, “Big Ben was to the British Empire what the local clock tower was to a village, its pulse of common life” (Peters 2013, pp. 39–40). It is perhaps no coincidence then that the elevated Nottingham clock and the rhythmic skeuomorphic waves it emits serve as a focal point and sonorous envelope that is perceptible to, and orients, the broader campus community. However, in saying this, and as if actualising today’s mantra of globalisation that in order “to dominate globally one must concede locally” it is noticeable that, for a while, the bell sound effect did not pump out at 13:00 in this glocalised Chinese setting, supposedly because of the local staff’s civilised and health-conscious habit of taking a nap after lunch (either on fold-away deckchairs stored in administrative office or, during the quiet summer months, on the beanbags of the “learning garden” in the library).10 If this was a temporary concession to the local ways, the inner machinations of the UNNC campus were to simulate the workings of the mother campus in a manner that speak to evolutionary theories of economics. Consider in such light Manuel DeLanda’s description of how organised business machines such as banks spread around the nation or planet through a form of contagion. The examples he uses—as is the case with UNNC and Starbucks coffee shops—invariably boast a stable form of “technostructure” that is made manifest by a series of hierarchical committees and apparatuses (for group decision making) that promote conformity among their ranks and institutions (see e.g. DeLanda 2000, p. 95). For such reasons, these types  of organisation can be viewed as bodies, which retain and repeat stable forms of organisational memory. Namechecking the economists Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter, DeLanda thus describes the spread of such technostructures in a manner that resonates with the arrival and early operations of UNNC in the Ningbo context. Indeed, when opening a branch in a foreign city, these forms of business organisation typically send a portion of its staff to recruit and train new people; in this way, it transmits its internal routines to the new branch. Thus, institutions may be said to transmit information vertically to their “offspring.” On the other hand,

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since many innovations spread through the economy of imitation, institutions may also affect each other in a manner analogous to infectious contagion. (DeLanda 2000, p. 146)

The operations of the University of Nottingham, as a British HEI here, might be read as a technostructural organism and arrangement whose progeny enters into a new niche or ecosystem, only to begin adapting and responding to its opportunities and stressors. In point of fact, the three current Nottingham University campuses (UK, Malaysia, China) overtly market themselves as setting up and sharing the same global forms of pedagogic habitus (see e.g. Brown et al. 2017), which serve similar functions in their local contexts. As discussed, UNNC also reveals certain formal markers and phenotypical features that speak of its genetic legacy or line, as, over and above the Trent Building, the 144 acres of gated campus also prominently features English gardens, Nottingham ducks and a medieval (world) statue of Robin Hood. This is not to mention an extended ecosystem of Western consumable brands and sublated any-now(here)-spaces that include a Starbucks and Subway franchises. This ecology of architectural arrangements and semiocapitalist machines invariably feature prominently in the institution’s promotional materials, and whenever photographed and filmed invariably appear  populated by a cast of “foreign” teaching staff (sometimes dressed in costumes, such as exotic graduation outfits or Chinese chángshān).11

Notes from Westworld II: Arrival on Set The marketing of branded foreign education in China had occasioned a corresponding desire for a marketable optics, with a larger proportion of staff displaying non-Chinese ethnicities (predominantly European, Indian, African) and educations. We are both white British, educated within the UK, US and European education systems, and when first employed at UNNC in 2010 and 2013, respectively, were fresh out of PhDs or Post-­ Doc positions. On a superficial level our ethnicities and credentials endowed us with a suitable “otherness” desirable for a position in the Sino-foreign “academic theme park” (Jenkins 2011), while our Early Career Researcher positions offered the company immanent publication outputs (the promise of a forthcoming PhD-derived monograph) and a certain promise of professional malleability and adaptability.

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It was also important that we both had organisational experience in the Western university system or sector. Indeed, linked to the above discussions of spreading technostructures, it is interesting to note how the founding provost of UNNC, Professor Ian Gow, explained back in 2007 that above and beyond the foreign staff needed to set up the franchise and transmit Nottingham’s organisational memory, an on-going desire to fill the UNNC campus with foreign human resources (or bodies and brains) was a direct consequence of local pressures, which in turn encoded differentiated consequences for any staff seconded or employed by what was then China’s most expensive private university: Chinese students (and their opinionated parents) want western faces if they are paying the higher fees. The Chinese government want us to send our top research staff—especially core research staff in the sciences—to work full-­ time for three years or longer. There is a reluctance to let foreign institutions hire Chinese academic staff, even if they are outstanding Chinese academics currently working at your home institution. Top research academics who come to China have to carry out much more onerous and time consuming academic administrative duties than back home, and therefore their research output often suffers. (Gow in Fazackerley and Worthington 2007, p. 7)

This acknowledgement about staff suffering from reduced research output, related to reductions in research time and higher administrative roles, is not something either author were explicitly informed about during their respective tele-interviews (though we now understand the importance of the Excel forms). To remain thinking about the university campus as a globalisation machine or semiocapitalist organism, it is also worth mentioning that the university also sets itself up as a conduit, or flow space, for strategically directing funds and bodies between different global spaces, often as a result of wider ideological desires to promote “Internationalisation” and “Globalization” (see e.g. Fazackerley and Worthington 2007). Or, as Michael Shattock puts it, many of the company’s executives “see the Ningbo campus as increasing the number of Chinese students they get coming to Nottingham. They also see it as an opportunity for British students to go to China” (in Fazackerley and Worthington 2007, p. 19). On account of this, UNNC’s website has continually celebrated itself as being one of the most successful “foreign businesses doing trade in China,” even if the same website refrains from offering statistics or figures to support these claims  (Fig.  5.5). But again, in the broader historical and

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Fig. 5.5  Captured website image: “UNNC recognized as one of Britain’s leading businesses in China”

geopolitical context this arguably makes sense, for as the Agora discussion paper reminds us: In the new world of globalised higher education the concept of profit is an uncomfortable one. Perhaps in part because of ingrained notions of propriety, and in part because of our embarrassment about our imperial past, UK vice chancellors are anxious to stress that they are venturing into China as much out of altruism as for commercial gain. (Fazackerley and Worthington 2007, p. 1)

And although many frame any altruistic claims about UNNC in a cynical light (see e.g. Onsman and Cameron 2014), after all is said and done, we would genuinely agree that enriching educational encounters are afforded by this technostructural arrangement. Or at least, while we concede that a managerial, marketing and politico-economic logic predominates in this any-now(here)-space, we have also each genuinely shared in the joyous and hair-raising experiences of life-affirming pedagogical interactions with our Chinese (and foreign) students, and thus feel we have occasionally played a part in a valuable knowledge and cultural exchange.

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At the same time, we were also demanded to horizontally pass on knowledge, skills and information to our Chinese higher education hosts and their organisations. For example, in the local environment our professional practices—invariably based on acculturated technostructural methods of British Russell Group HEI practices—were regularly extracted and audited by the Wanli Education Group partner company and the Chinese Education Ministry.12 Accordingly, in economic terms, our Chinese hosts were also often perceived as being “more of a threat than an opportunity” to the British HEI model (Gow in Fazackerley and Worthington 2007, p.  7) because, as Gow put it: “China wants to be the leading power in higher education, and it will extract what it can from the UK” (ibid.). In order to better transversally or fractally explore what the modern British education system is in the era of globalisation and how it alters and impacts the subjectivities of the staff and students who transact within such an offshore education space—and by extension describe the landscape of modern Chinese academia more broadly—we will now switch to different scalar levels of analysis to explore the nature of the subjective and pedagogic experiences that we have observed to unfold there.

Notes from Westworld III: Invasion of the Body Snatchers Once in situ and oriented, it struck us as odd that on two separate occasions in 2013 employed teaching staff were treated to visits by professional acting troupes or actors that were hired as part of the latest drive for continuous professional development (CPD) linked to quality teaching performances: part of a wider instance of corporate universities increasingly offering corporate “workshops in how to teach in advance of any collective sense of what it means to teach” (Champagne 2011, p.  12). The first troupe predominantly catered to global corporations with PR problems and ran a slick interactive US-style workshop on “dignity” (quotations reconstructed from our notes). In good faith this workshop was designed to simulate and act out a series of scenarios wherein people of different backgrounds and cultural contexts interact, in order to grease the wheels of cultural friction. More startling than this, though, was the lecture-cumworkshop run nearer the end of 2013 for all undertaking their compulsory UK PGCHE (Post Graduate Certificate of Higher Education) teaching qualifications. An in-house University of Nottingham service farmed out

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to the satellite campuses to help ensure a high standard(isation) of teaching, and perhaps intensified in the ‘far-flung’ campus branches because of a lingering attitude (thought to be held by the mother school faculty) that it was the “Wild West” out there and high turnovers of staff meant that poor or lazy teachers were protected from redundancy. A paid actor who we will call Alias Osobold began his session with a statement from management: “Every University is a brand, and has a certain style: a way it wants to be perceived.” The professional performer then riffed on a career wherein modern universities, and other corporations, hire him to improve employees’ public speaking skills or to instruct staff on how to employ “confident stances,” and other desirable postures, movements and vocal techniques that audiences find “pleasing,” and aid “lectures and presentations to reflect the brand.” Although this actor had observed similar (brand?) styles in Oxford and Reading, different institutions tended to have their own preference for a style deemed their own. Broadly speaking, the UK “Russell Group” style, of which we were to be practitioners—as this is what the brand was advertising to the Chinese customers, should be “open and conversational.” Actor training would help us achieve this, Osobold asserted, as long as we understood deep down what our “sponsor’s emotional desires were.” We would learn this in forty minutes and sign in to be rewarded with certification credits. Osobold’s training programme proceeded to unleash a series of diagrams, statistics and pie charts. Many measurable features and mnemonically memorable means of memorising them were utilised, alongside (the now dubious or debunked) Mehrabian pie charts (dissecting communication into verbal/non-verbal) and Thomas Anthony Harris’ dated but still self-helpful diagrams from I’m OK—You’re OK (1967). Amidst a blizzard of other slides, and handouts, audience members were also told that “HOW” we present information to audiences is more important than “WHAT” that information is. Before we could argue or feedback on this instruction to privilege style over content, participants were asked to walk in and out of the room three times each, to physically learn the most confident way to enter UNNC classrooms. Knee first was the key, apparently. We were also then trained in, among other things, how: “to connect to the audience through performance”; “to storyboard and plan the emotional texture of the entire performance”; “to give the audience variety”; “to give the audience a good experience”; “to plan positive audience impact in advance”; “to act off the line [read script].”

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Other techniques, we were instructed, came from the latest US “neuro linguistic programming” research. These would enable us to better “Mirror-Pace-Lead” within a lecture or employ micro-affects to make the experience we were providing as pleasing as possible to the audience. The final act offered a bonus lesson on how to take questions after a lecture (or at a conference) designed to make it look like one is giving a considered response. Here, techniques were taught from the second year of drama school (and/or the English for Academic Purposes speaking class), where the challenge is to “suspend someone’s disbelief so that the audience will think you are someone that is not you!” In brief, when asked a tricky question, we should use RRP: . Remain confident in voice and posture. 1 2. Repeat the question back to buy some “thinking time.” 3. Pause (and consider the following options):

(a) Park the question (avoid or defer to some unspecified break). (b) Deflect the question to a colleague. (c) Say this is an interesting point but you are not sure. (d) Confidently respond with what looks like a “considered” response.

Doing all this, one wonders if this actor would himself pass an academic Turing test or be able to successfully pass for a Russell Group lecturer in UNNC’s Chinese Rooms. If this all seems to reveal a superficial parallel with film actors and “the gestural language of all-American entrepreneurial self-promotion” (Harbord 2019, p. 189), we want to turn to a more profound—read subjective or psychological—level of assembly and programming within this transnational shi-nematic assemblage that erect yet more fertile vectors with the programmed hosts of Westworld. And here again our fractal diagram looms large, with its kinetic and cinematic transverals helping us explain how an UNNC teacher embedded in such a performative matrix begins to internalise and execute institutional level (qua organisational memory) programming associated with “neoliberal managerialism”—the sort of technostructural systems which, as William Dinan and David Miller point out, lead to the “enduring penetration and management of [teachers’] minds, perceptions, beliefs and behaviours” (Dinan and Miller quoted in Dahlström 2008).13 These are broader sector drives that at UNNC became manifest

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through the hierarchical drive to generate (for simultaneous capture and marketing) “key performance indicators” (or KPIs) that were defined and allocated to different “units of assessment” (or UOAs), wherein academic subject groups (such as a discipline or a division) were increasingly compelled to take their fair share and meet the target metrics proposed in areas such as learning, teaching, internationalisation, and research in order to secure the next round of funding—or risk having either  to merge with other underperforming units or to have the plug pulled altogether.14 Notions and measurements of performativity here emerge as another operational dispositif, which as Thompson and Cook point out, can be exposed as another managerial “technology” that we can perceive as a mode of “regulation that employs judgments, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition and change” (Thompson and Cook 2012, p. 576). Further associated with this recoding of the pedagogical body-mind is an increasingly common lament emerging from the post-1992 UK universities that suggests that staff are increasingly “being controlled” (Hilo 2007), “spinning faster but not going anywhere” (Thompson and Cook 2012, p. 577) and are being “driven to burnout” (Whitty 1997, p. 305). Statistically and anecdotally speaking, mental illness and neoliberal academia appear to go hand in glove (see Davies 2005), with the modern university being described by psychologists as an “unhealthy institution” that fosters and promotes “incivility, bullying, and other forms of employee abuse” (Zabrodska et al. 2013, p. 717).15 Ever intensifying workloads, job insecurity, endless re-organisations, funding pressure, excessive competitiveness, power imbalances between managers and academics, and weakened—or in UNNC’s case outlawed—unions all constitute stressors and stresses (see Zabrodska et  al. 2013, p.  710).16A common compromise of UK executives is to increasingly offer their precariats so-called “robustness training” or talks by so-called “experts” who can help staff think positively or improve (their perception of?) their workways. In the film Westworld the park’s programmers knew in advance that there would be a 0.3% failure rate for the performing droids. Out of sight, the burnout and breakdown rate of semiocapital academic staff at UNNC is (anecdotally speaking) far higher. Hence maybe why one author was told almost immediately upon arrival of a three-year estimated shelf life in the new environment, where it was not uncommon to meet people experiencing exile from paradise syndrome or even those who

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were openly “jumping ship.” In many ways, it absolutely is the Wild West out there.

EX Men versus the Yes Men Beyond experts being flown in for workshops on physical acting and psychic robustness, during our appointment period at UNNC we also witnessed the arrival of a “People Development Office” and with it a world famous “Thought Leader.” For in 2014, UNNC hired the founder of the World Employee Experience Institute and branded Mr Employee Experience™, (who we will give here the fictional moniker of) Brent Puffer, whose website reports his time at UNNC as follows: Uniquely, [Brent] spent 3 years in China developing his approach and vision for EX [Employee Experience] at the first and leading foreign-Sino University. In this Director role, the first of its kind, the University experienced double-digit improvements across its major engagement metrics.17

The arrival of a “multi-award winning Tidalwave Leader” and People Development Office aroused much curiosity among the faculty, not least because this “first of its kind” office began by repurposing, re-architecting and rebranding the academic faculty space. Whereas the designated room had previously homed two lecturers at desks arranged facing each other with a communal meeting table in an open space environment, the arrangement of the People Development space involved a wall divider that cleaved the office into two, creating a reception desk at the front to be manned by a secretary-cum-photographer, then a steel encased office with floor-length blinds towards the back of the room for the expert. This newly built office space embodied a co-working arrangement and power technostructure that mirrored those of academic senior management, but was distinguished by a mobile life-size roller banner, often positioned outside the office door and featuring a close-up, slick, photo-brushed image of the said expert. Science fiction cloning and teleportation come to mind here, because this banner (or a newly printed one) would pop up or pop out at the various locations across campus to signal where the expert was to be making an appearance. As per classic Hollywood cinema, where “a star entrance serves to announce and spectacularise the actor” (Harbord 2019, p. 187), such glossy surrogates served to pre-announce through the advertising copy on the poster that the real “globally recognised leader,”

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Fig. 5.6  Mobile banner announcing success with the arrival of the Thought Leader

“winner of prestigious ‘best in UK’” and “HR Thought Leader” would be arriving at a specified date and time to deliver his masterclasses (Fig. 5.6). As can also be seen in the poster, the topic of this keynote is encased in the upside down triangle familiar from corporate marketing posters, with the title and subtitle based on repeating a similarly corporate notion of “success”: “success in career life,” “philosophy of success” and “how to be successful.” Students could not just openly attend or even register for this event but, reminiscent of the techniques with which online companies extract personal data, had to “apply” to attend by scanning a QR code. The primary task of the People Development Office was to develop the experience of the UNNC staff and students, and this we can now gather, by “rolling out” programmes whose impact and output could retroactively be quantified to generate the desired “double-digit improvements.” We recall one project whose filmic dimension merits particular discussion here. Drawing on media meta-data reporting this project on LinkedIn, the so-called JackMa@UNNC campaign was a promotional video “to reach out to the wealthiest man in China in an innovative, interactive and

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creative way” (Avery-Phipps 2015). A closer look at this video offers insight to how student experience, under managerial dulosis and through the discourse of people development, can become quantified and improved within a paradigm of people development. According to the expert’s own LinkedIn article, JackMa@UNNC began with “200 UNNCers in one day signing up to actively help” by joining a WeChat group shared via QR code. Out of this newly forged and digitalised proto-community emerged an eighty-plus project team to design and produce the promotional video, which apparently received “over 10,000 views” and garnered “15,000 people supporting the campaign.” Driving these figures is an eight-minute amateur film called Jack MA, The World Invites You (马云, 世界邀请你), in which UNNC students can be seen projecting themselves into various roles and futures.18 The amateur daydream film opens to the scene of China’s richest man (played by an undergraduate student) being chauffeured into the university in a Mercedes Benz motorcade against the backdrop of the university clock tower. This visiting dignitary is then escorted into the Trent Building by two bodyguards, one of whom has been bestowed the honour of wearing the very shoes of Mr Employee Experience, who later explained it was because “mine were shinier than his!” This we suggest evidences an underlying “common language” for which this film and film-making experience was striving, the shiny shoe of the star offering a taste of the aspirational world one could inhabit, whilst at the same time resonating with the mythical persona of the “wealthiest man” who the film was being made to invite (Harbord 2019). The next sequence in the film aims to establish parallels through its editing between Alibaba (the company Ma co-founded and was executive chairman of) and UNNC as two “pioneers of the country,” and in doing so, we see a flattening of distinctions between corporate and academic worlds—between environments for learning and environments for selling: both spaces of future wealth generation and self-improvement. As shown in Fig.  5.7, this parallel universe is achieved by juxtaposing images that portray topologically similar environments at the UNNC campus on the one hand and Alibaba’s Taobao headquarters in Hangzhou on the other (a/b, c/d). The host’s verbal repetition and parallel linguistic structures reinforce these similarities: “Working at Alibaba, what you can feel is devotion and innovation. Studying at UNNC, what you can feel is confidence and autonomy.” This episode of sequencing culminates in a cinematic blend courtesy of an invisible edit, in which the host exits one door at

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Fig. 5.7  Jack Ma, The World Invites You: a student-led amateur short blending corporate and academic worlds

Alibaba only to arrive into the alternate reality of the UNNC main foyer (e/f). With the multinational conglomerate at Taobao City and the UNNC now running in a blend (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), the desired addressee of the video (Jack Ma) is given a guided tour of the UNNC

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campus and introduced to its activities and inhabitants, including a critical thinking class, wildlife, children and students—the latter closing the film with a final “Welcome,” spelled out with their own disciplined bodies in anthropomorphic alphabet. In this closing shot, the UNNC students are seen literally bending over backwards in a plea to attract China’s wealthiest man to their campus, which through cinematic blends they have likened to the offices of China’s largest online supermarket (Taobao). A pedagogical ethics looms heavy and demands interrogation of our individual and collective “teaching philosophies.” What should we say to these students, in our open and conversational branded style, that would be of benefit for moving forward? For Davies, honesty suggests we admit that “Education under neoliberalism, is no longer a public good” (Davies 2005, p. 11). But only a faulty droid would say such a thing to a paying customer being encouraged to hail China’s richest man, and those droids get downgraded or decommissioned. Let us instead turn to our teaching environs and architectural assemblages and examine the shi-nematic state of play.

The Student Experience If Giorgio Agamben can be interpreted as “re-casting the history of cinema as a great archive of gestures” (Harbord 2019, p. 185), we here wish to recast the media meta-data from UNNC (like JackMa@UNNC) as such an archive too, and find further examples among the inhabitants of UNNC that help us recall and characterise the shi-nematic state of play. The archive we turn to now contains examples of English language usage collected by applied linguists, promotional videos released by the Human Resources office, and a range of images from the Department of Campus Life website and the official social media accounts of the Student Union. Connections across these different materials offer further evidence that Chinese people are increasingly being manipulated to act, speak and move in ways that have become subsumed within, and infected by, a larger network of semiocapitalist gestures and (trans)actions. In a recent paper titled “I Don’t Have Communicate Ability,” Chen, Harrison, and Weekly (2019) have discussed the notions of “error” and “deviation” in relation to observations of English language in international higher education settings, including  UNNC.  After surveying a range of features of student English in samples of typical written and spoken activities  (such as essays, presentations, and group discussions), the

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researchers turn to an example of spoken interaction from a student group discussion in their corpus. In their example, a group of five students have been working on a language exercise related to academic English and now consult each other about answers to the questions in the textbook. However, one of the students mispronounces the letter sound “g” as “j” (in phonetic alphabet / dʒeɪ/), which the group members perceive as a mistake and offer help by pronouncing the correct form “gee” (/dʒi/). However, to do this, the students codeswitch to Chinese, and what catches the researchers’ attention at this point is the teacher who can be heard responding to this critical moment by saying “English ladies, English!” Mortensen (2014) has referred to statements like “English ladies” in the context of English Medium Instruction as “top-down policy enforcement”. He contrasts this with the “bottom-up practices” that students in such contexts appear to agree on (often implicitly) as most appropriate for or beneficial to their interaction, which in the current example involved students  negotiating the linguistic problem by speaking in their native Chinese. Chen et al. (2019) point out that in addition to students picking up on errors in the way they speak English, “certain languaging practices, such as codeswitching and speaking in the [mother tongue], which are used to resolve language issues among students, may constitute deviations that teachers often try to fix in the classroom context” (n.p.). To risk stating the obvious, what this example tells us is that inside the UNNC campus world the English language becomes a form of alien “superimposed norm” (DeLanda 2000, p. 205). The pro-English language ideologies revealed by such norms have long been critiqued by commentators from applied linguistics and education. Jenkins (2011), for example, cites such policies as evidence that “the focus in university settings, and particularly in their higher-stakes activities, remains firmly rooted in a bounded, national, monolinguacultural view of English” (p. 928). This suggests for Jenkins that the term “international” in a context like UNNC actually means “local to the geographically, culturally and linguistically distant UK” (p. 933). Such monolinguaculturalism is one reason why Jenkins has famously argued that Sino-foreign ventures and specifically UNNC “seems in reality to be little more than an academic themepark” (2011, p. 933). If we explore the segment from Chen et al.’s paper a bit further, however, we find evidence for different interpretations of what “international” can mean in these settings, and we discover the need to entertain not one

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“reality” but multiple intermeshing “reals,” which, as we mentioned earlier, can include global economic realities, state realities, provincial realities, corporate realities, urban realities, agent realities, consumer realities, class realities, familial realities, and semiocapital and subjective realities— some of which may seem quite alien to people who have not experienced a living, breathing, gesturing Sino-foreign venture in situ. We also find that in addition to the flows and tensions along a vertical axis identified by language policy researchers (Mortensen 2014), we need to account for flows and tensions that are more horizontal in nature, which following DeLanda include cultural replicators coming through informal social networks, say, or peer-to-peer groups, and even one-to-many structures via advertising or trendy influencers (DeLanda 2000). Diving back into the example of student group interaction, we find that the struggling student requests clarification by drawing the letter J in the air with her finger and asking in Chinese “那这个呢” (this one then?). All students respond in chorus to this gesture with the sound “J”, then one peer who we will call Sun goes a step further and says “gee 你就记住那个

Fig. 5.8  A K-pop dance routine incorporates a Starbucks coffee cup

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gee 那个韩国那个东西” (gee you just remember that gee, that Korean one thing). An image from the video clip shows how with this utterance, as Sun refers to a well-known Korean pop song, she is jogging her upper body in a dancing motion while clutching a Starbucks coffee cup (Fig.  5.8). The teacher can again be heard in the recording asking the students to only speak “English please,” but this time first interrupting them (“ahem”) then upgrading the request to a reprimand “I shouldn’t have to remind you about this.” Adding to Chen et al.’s transcript, we see that Sun nods, says “yes,” and takes a swig of the coffee she has been holding throughout this episode. From the perspective of teaching and learning, we might follow Nguyen and Pennycook (2018) in interpreting the way these students draw and dance out meanings as “communicative strategies to ensure they are understood” (p. 7). This was the case with one of Nguyen and Pennycook’s interviewees: “it seems like I’m dancing to illustrate my idea, because my English is not good. Sometimes the teacher doesn’t understand, I have to even draw and explain” (p.  7). The students in our example seem to understand each other perfectly well, so gesture is not being used as a strategy to make up for proficiency or fluency. Rather, we see the way that students are using their bodies here as further evidence of the intrusion and incorporation of alien cultures, namely the sounds of a Romanised alphabet (drawing) and commercialised pop songs from Korea (dancing). From this perspective, there is much more to be said about the origin and function of the dance, especially when we consider that a Starbucks coffee cup has become embedded into its embodied and extended performance. In a follow-up interview we learned that the dance performance was a citational reference to a Korean pop (K-pop) music video that the student expected her classmate to know. The influence of screen media on the embodied gestures in this shi-nematic classroom transaction is a detail worth lingering on here. Indeed, when discussing Greta Gerwig’s gestures in films such as Frances Ha (2012) and Mistress America (2015), Janet Harbord activates Agamben’s theories to highlight a process whereby we see “gesture as citation of another individual’s practices” (2019, p. 186), or more specifically “a bodily citation of films” (p. 188). Motivated by the idea that one person’s generic performance may be “inhabited critically and citationally” by another through her gestures, we can here point to the “gee gee gee” dance as a horizontal citational expression of the chorus line of the (multi-award winning) song “Gee” by the K-pop group Girls’ Generation.

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Of relevance to our broader fractal picture, the music video accompanying this song opens with images of a clothes store, wherein the male owner is seen arranging mannequins (played by members of Girl’s Generation) in his shop window before turning off the lights and leaving for the evening. At this point the music begins and the mannequins, who have been arranged to exhibit various postures and gestures, come to life and dance around the shop trying on clothes, adorning themselves with various accessories (hats, glasses, pearls, feathers), idolising images of the store manager, and singing about their feelings of love. Occasionally the camera frames the store clock to indicate their freedom is constrained by the imminent return of the shop manager. Interspersed with this storyline are highly choreographed arrangements in which the girls frequently regroup to sing and dance the chorus “gee gee gee.” Towards the end of the song, the girls re-assume their position as mannequins in anticipation of the owner’s return, but at the last minute change their mind and escape the store through a backdoor. Motivating the student’s dancing therefore is not only a desire to be understood (as per Nguyen and Pennycook 2018) but also horizontal affects and desires stemming from elsewhere, here made manifest in the flows of commercial pop music from Korea (that culture which has, as Berardi points out, become entirely overwritten by screen culture) to China. On further reflection, the classroom setting in which the student bodily cites this K-pop video shares uncanny similarities with the shop floor scenario of the film itself. For, in both clips a man has arranged a group of women into a particular configuration for one purpose (to sell clothes in the K-pop video, to learn English in the classroom video), yet when left to their own devices the women engage in dynamic dancing behaviour that their supervisees would perceive as deviant (running wild in the store, speaking Chinese in the classroom). For Chen et al. (2019), “It seems that deviation may take on different characteristics, which depends on whether the speaker and addressee perceive the feature or action as a deviation” (n.p.). Further parallels may also be drawn between this scene and those from our previous chapter on the real estate showrooms, as we have similar shop window dressing and a pressurised consumer situation. However, what is different is the dramatic escape that occurs in the K-pop video, because real estate showrooms and Western education institutes in Ningbo are both framed as highly privileged places for people to get (and stay) in. Harbord argues that “gesture in film is a mediation of the body in movement in which certain features of gesture are rehearsed, pronounced,

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repressed and conditioned by the specificities implicit to cinema” (2019, p. 186). A closer look at the student’s bodily citation of the K-pop dance similarly enables us to identify how specificities implicit to the classroom environments at UNNC might also impact on students’ embodied behavior. One of these is the cup of branded coffee held by the student during her dance, because in 2016 a Starbucks coffee outlet was officially incorporated into one of the main teaching and learning buildings at UNNC. That could be how a Starbucks coffee cup can be seen lending its logo to the student’s K-pop dance routine. In this articulation we locate two or three global semiocapitalisms interacting in a surprising assemblage (or more if we consider the various other brands on periodic display, such as the student’s Apple devices, branded trainers and designer T-shirt). As such a Starbucks-K-pop convergence emerges as a product collaboration afforded under the branded education umbrella of the UNNC environment.

Planet Starbucks and the “RUOK” Zoo The arrival of a Starbucks at UNNC was initially met with some controversy, but the campus Starbucks is now part and parcel of the UNNC experience and brand image. This was certainly the case for the student whom we interviewed, who bought a Starbucks coffee on the way to class “sixty per cent to eighty per cent” of the time. Starbucks coffee for her was “like milk,” because as she told us: “I always latte” (the latter possibly being a slang verb that demonstrates a form of semiocapitalist incorporation of student behaviour and desires, though English teachers might still see a deviant  grammatical construction). We can now retroactively understand the contents of the venti-sized Starbucks cup incorporated into the student’s K-pop dance as probably containing mostly milk and, what is more, not necessarily purchased for the taste of bitter coffee or associated caffeine buzz. The student acknowledged the drink’s potential to help her “not be feel sleepy” but said that was only “mental stuff” (read psychological). She drank coffee instead to keep warm because of “the air conditioning” in the classrooms, and because over the course of her program she had developed a routine of having “afternoon coffee.” By connecting her coffee habit to bodily movement and temperature, as well as to the taste of milk and the timetable of her English language classes (presided over by the skeuomorphic chimes of the bell), we find evidence for the “new tendencies in capitalist commodification” identified by Thrift (2008, p. 29). We see their potential in “changing how encounter with the

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commodity is thought of and practiced by the consumer (by trying to not so much control as to modulate vicissitude by boosting what is brought to the encounter)” (p. 31; emphasis in original). More specifically, these products are designed to “pay much more attention to affect.” How? Because “it has become clear that affectively binding consumers through their own passions and enthusiasms sells more goods” (p. 37). It is not only students who enjoy the coffee in classrooms, of course. And the campus Starbucks has become a major selling point for attracting staff too, if the latest staff recruitment video (at the time of writing) is anything to go by at least. Consider here a promotional video currently accessible through a web page hosted by the UNNC Human Resources Office under the tab Job Opportunities.19 This short film was produced in 2018, following a call for proposals from the Human Resource Office to all staff inviting them to submit scripts for a video aimed at attracting applicants for faculty positions on the UNNC campus. A number of scripts were accepted and combined in creating the video (including a script submitted by one of your authors). Of relevance to our discussion here is the scene that occurs towards the start of this day-in-the-life video, as the main character passes the campus Starbucks on his way to work (Fig. 5.9).

Fig. 5.9  Starbucks outlet built into teaching/learning spaces

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As can be seen in the subtitles, this image of Starbucks is coordinated with a speech act guaranteeing that the university “ensures that we can settle seamlessly in Ningbo”—implicitly endorsing Starbucks as a necessary ingredient for staff well-being, while associating it with a generalised and normalised notion of a Western culture or elsewhere. In the background, consumed consumers (or, in old money, students in graduation gowns) even more subtly connect the consumption of Starbucks’ desiccating products to academic success. Worth recalling here is that, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch recounts it, coffee and the coffee industry became historically implicated with the demands of capital, not least because at the subjective level (of our fractal model) it is a product renowned for increasing a worker’s alertness and productivity (for a social history of such intoxicants, see Schivelbusch 1993, p. 45). The intrusion of this Starbucks outlet into the UNNC teaching and learning assemblage is of course symptomatic of the corporation’s wider arrival into the Chinese marketplace. For in the borough surrounding the UNNC campus today are no less than 50 Starbucks outlets, which themselves constitute a fraction of the 3000 to 5000 outlets currently doing business in China, with some statistics suggesting that one new Starbucks store opens every sixteen hours.20 The appearance and popularisation of Starbucks in China must also be understood as making a series of new demands upon the nation’s and region’s dairy industry and transforming the topology of farming, its bovine biopolitics and by extension the environment. This brief consideration of the paragon of animals might in turn motivate us to consider another UNNC space also currently shaping the smells, sights, tastes and other tactile sensorimotor experiences available within this educational shi-­ nematic arrangement. The UNNC zoo is a pop-up space set up as an “RUOK” initiative during the exam periods. The Events page of UNNC’s website announced this initiative in 2018 as follows: From 9 to 16 December, a series of specially organised “RUOK” Week events will take place on campus to help students cope with exam anxieties. A wide range of support services and activities will be there to help you stay the best you can be—physically, emotionally and academically. There will be staff handing out candies, stores giving special offers, and outdoor sport activities to name a few. Therapy animals will be brought to campus, so don’t miss out!21

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On the website of the Department of Campus Life, some of these activities are specified: During the week, there were workshops given by professionals that offered strategies for effective revision, as well as several relaxing activities such as meditation, boxing and ikebana. We also cooperated with about 60 tutors from FoSE, FHSS, NUBS and CELE to have a candy-sharing event with students. Besides, we also worked with campus shops to provide special offers to the students during the event week, such as free coffee given away by Starbucks. What’s more, we brought in new members to the Petting Zoo—2 Shetland ponies and 2 cockatoos! All of these activities aim to reduce pressure and ensure that students have the best possible time while studying for the exams.22

Although well intentioned, such events also invariably constitute major photo opportunities or image (read promo) generating activities, the results of which can be viewed on the website of the Department of Campus Life (Fig. 5.10). In these images we see more-than-human interactions that justify referencing a posthumanist take on international education. As, for Pennycook (2018), “human relations with animals reveal much of what it is to be

Fig. 5.10  Therapy animals in the petting zoo during RUOK Week (displayed on the Department of Campus Life website)

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human—cruel, ugly, vicious and abusive, as well as loving, caring and capable of bonding with other species more strongly than we do at times with our own” (p. 77). The RUOK activities certainly provoke us to begin “rethinking relations between humans and non-humans, and particularly non-human animals” (p. 73), demanding that we also confront an “integrated and entangled set of relations between humans and non-humans” (p. 74) that, rather than fostering “deep emotional relationships with animals” (p. 77), might instead instil more of a transactional human-animal relationship during times of the year that are particularly tense for the human customer base. Which is to say, in the RUOK gesture we can perceive animals being allotted the task of absorbing and digesting the students’ anxieties and stresses. These human-animal trans-actions might in turn also be likened to the transactional nature of the “sweets in a book” initiative (“As always, tutors sent candies to you for the review season. The passion of tutors makes everyone feel warm.”), which exposes how, alongside caffeine, student bodies are also encouraged to metabolise sugar and glucose in an associate move designed to sweeten and infantilise the educational experience. Coffee and sweets are good for consumption culture, of course, but our friends in medicine and dentistry remind us are perhaps not so good for the body parts that break them down. The very gesture and perceived need to run an RUOK week already suggests there is a darker side to campus life though, which is here associated with the paying customers and therapy animals more than the academic hosts. In images from Students’ Union social media reporting of the “RUOK” week, we can clearly witness the tetherings of various animals, including corgies, parrots, llamas and ponies that appear cooped up and marshalled into configurations for ideal photo and petting opportunities. The reason for this negation of animal liberty is of course tied to student mental health and well-being (also a problem in the UK context), with increasing pressures placed upon students to succeed also being linked to a series of suicides that UNNC experienced on campus (and reflecting similar issues that happen in and around the local malls, as reported in Chap. 6).

Conclusions The materials described in this chapter were accumulated through several years of legal alien life at Ningbo’s UNNC. Chinese urban shi-nema provided our framework through which to look back and make sense of the many

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memories and observations which we recall from this time, supplemented by browsing relevant websites and publications. We hope to have granted readers a taste of these consumable experiences and, while doing so, offered reasoning and evidence for reframing them as cinematic and science fictional. To leave off from this Sino-foreign assemblage for now, we offer a final form of cinematic fade that, in anticipation of discussions to come in the next chapter, (abstractly) directs attention to a colourful bird from the RUOK zoo. We are referring to the aforementioned promotional staff recruitment video, which concludes with an edited mash-up of the current UNNC staff performing what appears to be a litanical and gestural form of citation, wherein each HR unit proclaims the same scripted statement (with some, rather comically, appearing to be post-dubbed or lip-synched). A transcript of this parrot passage, which in another context might be mistaken for a science fictional droid’s burnout glitch, reads: “I love working at UNNC. I love working at UNNC.  I love working at UNNC.  I love working at UNNC. I love working at UNNC. I love working at UNNC. I love working at UNNC. I love working at UNNC. I love working at UNNC. I love working at UNNC. I love working at UNNC. I love working at UNNC.”

Notes 1. Our use of the term “detour” throughout this book derives from the notion of détournement, a critical and dialectical manoeuvre popularised by Guy Debord and the Letterist International, and later the Situationist International. Détournnement is a term often translated as “deflection,” “diversion,” “detour,” “hijack,” “misuse,” or “reroute” in English. In thesis 208 of Society of the Spectacle (1984), Debord argues that détournement must appear “‘in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any inherent or definitive certainty.”’ Elsewhere, in the 1956 essay “‘A Users Guide to Detournement”’ co-authored with Gil J. Wolman, the procedure is described it in terms of a “‘mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, [which supersede] the original elements”’ to produce a “‘synthetic organisation of greater efficacy”’ (1956, p. 15). Our use of the term “detour” throughout aims to evoke this sense of hijacking and deflecting original meaning. 2. The TV series not only plays on the enduring appeal of mythical cinematic Westerns on the cultural imagination but also toys with the subsequent impact of cognate screen media such as video games, especially by intertextually quoting the Red Dead Redemption game (Rockstar Games 2010, 2018) throughout series 1. 3. Here, the actor’s Russian nationality—and his own false claims of being half-­ Japanese and half-Swiss—always already enfolds a notion of “indiscrimi-

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nate” ethnic otherness into his star image—which was further compounded or sublated by his fictional portrayals of the King of Siam in The King and I (1956) and the Egyptian Pharaoh in The Ten Commandments (1956). 4. During the post-Mao reform period, or that which David Leiwei Li refers to as the “Regan-Thatcher-Deng Xiaoping Revolution”, when  the subjective effects of a neoliberal marketisation saw the Chinese citizenry begin mutating into new forms of “homo economicus” (Li 2016, p. 58) one (what many consider to be the first) Chinese science fiction film did emerge: this being Shanhu Dao Shang de Siguang/Death Ray on a Coral Island (dir Zhang Hongmei, 1980). Shortly thereafter,  Jie Zhang notes that in 1983 the “Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution” found conservative Chinese Communist Party (CCP) voices openly criticise science fiction stories for their use of “false science” (wie kexue), which ultimately led to the genre becoming dormant again (Zhang 2014, p. 39). In 2011 science fictional themes such as time travel were also forbidden in CCP film and television in an attempt to prevent radical ideological encounters or confrontations between Chinese peoples hailing from different historico-political eras (see e.g. Brody 2011). 5. Tied to the director’s auteurial persona (discussed in the previous chapter) Shije also focuses upon the banal lives and problems of the poor and dislocated Chinese workers within this simulacral theme park, drawing into relief the asymmetric logic of an epoch that the Mexican-Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel aptly labels as the age of “globalisation and exclusion” (2013, p. xv). 6. On reflection, this strange and unexpected meeting with ourselves can be likened to the double or triple play of mirrors one can encounter upon dashing into a hotel foyer (see e.g. Epstein 1981) or into a showroom (Chap. 3), or a mall (Chap. 6)—a hall of shi-nematic reflections in a manner that also recalls the mirror labyrinth scene in Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai (1947). 7. In the broader context of Western HEIs, many also critiqued the marketising and corporatising of education, pointing to many other cultural, historical, health and well-being problems associated with handing over modern universities to venture capitalists, business managers and micro economists (see inter alia Geoff Whitty (1997), Bill Readings (1997), S Boxley (2003), Dave Hill (2004, 2007), William Dinan and David Miller (2007), Bronwyn Davies (2007), Davies and Peter Bansel (2005, 2007), Michellle Attard Tonna (2007), Lars Dahlström (2008), Ian Cook and Greg Thompson (2012)). Dahlström, for example, argues that such trends transformed Western universities into business-like enterprises that “lock intellectual work into the neoliberal matrix based on market discourses of competition and surveillance masked as evaluative research with the purpose to find excellence according to market values” (2009, p. 169). The end goal of this is the production of elite schools of “excellence” that essentially “undermines the intellectual institutional narratives needed for

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the universities’ long-term survival as creative and critical intellectual platforms” (Dahlström 2009, p. 169). 8. It is worth remembering that under New Labour steersmanship a US-style neoliberal transformation of British politics and education—often known as the “Third Way”—was pushed beyond the realms of previous Conservative and Thatcher governments (see e.g. Jessop 2003). 9. With this in mind, it is of little surprise that critical voices appeared alarmed at how new-fangled educational “Disneyworlds” (Readings 1997) and “themeparks” (Jenkins 2011, p. 933) began operating as academic marketplaces or “shopping supermarkets where each item (institution or individual) survives on its competitive purchasing value” (Dahlström 2009, pp. 169–170). 10. https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/news/the-names-behind-ourbuildings/openings-and-re-namings-reshaping-the-unnc-experience.aspx. 11. Historic England website describes the Trent Building thus: “Educational building, now university. 1922–1928. By Morley Horder for the University College of Nottingham. Site provided by Sir Jesse Boot of Nottingham. Portland stone with copper roofs. Classical Revival style. EXTERIOR: ground floor string course, main and attic cornices, coped parapets. Windows are mainly original glazing bar sashes. Symmetrical composition with central block recessed between wings and topped by a tall clock tower. 2 storeys plus basement and attics; 7:17:7 windows. H-plan, with central quadrangle flanked to east and west by open-ended courtyards. In the centre, a projecting portico, 3 windows, with pediment containing a crest. Cross-casement French windows to basement and ground floor. Above the portico, the square bell tower with angle pilasters and pyramidal roof with wind vane. On the middle stage, pedimented aedicules and clock faces. Side wings, 2 storeys plus basement, are divided by giant pilasters, doubled at the corners. East wing has an extended basement, 7 windows. In the quadrangle, under the tower, the projecting main entrance, with a round-arched opening, 2 storeys, containing a moulded ashlar doorcase with a Diocletian window above. Over it, a tripartite attic window, and a flat gable with a large datestone, 1928, and Latin inscription. The other sides have regular fenestration and central doors. East courtyard has regular fenestration on each side, with central doorways to east and north. Similar west courtyard, flanked on north and south by single storey ranges. INTERIOR has stone panelled lobby, entrance hall, and corridors on each floor. Entrance hall has moulded cross beam ceiling on 4 granite Doric columns. East wing has a concrete open well stair. Adjoining library, 2 storeys, has panelled ceiling with skylights and cross beams. Largely intact original fittings including wooden screens and balconies in each bay. West wing has Great Hall, 2 storeys, marble clad, with panelled cross beam ceiling. Arcades, 7 bays, with square piers, galleries, and central doors. Coved ends, one with stage, the other with organ gallery (The Buildings of

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England: Pevsner N: Nottinghamshire: London: 1979–, pp. 256–257).” Interestingly, although built in the contemporary era, there is no institutional memory about the designer and builders of the UNNC Trent building tower. Indeed, in an April 2016 email to Dr Paul Martin who was researching the history of the 2005 building, the Estates office replied, “The building was built by a third party and seems few people have any idea about it now” (Martin in personal correspondance with author 2016). 12. At UNNC this horizontal transfer or extraction occurred thanks to an added administration duty bestowed upon each module convenor or coordinator, who at the end of each term had to submit a complete “module box” (containing a substantial sample of the teaching and learning materials, reading lists, exams and assessments, sample answers and grade spreads) for the benefit of Chinese stakeholders. 13. Like others, Bronwyn Davies displays alarm at how this neoliberal language of managerialism stealthily became the way in which academics came to know themselves (because these were the matrices through which they were professionally viewed, assessed, upskilled and upgraded). More troublingly still, by increasingly “speaking ourselves into existence as academics” in these ways, “we, not quite out of choice and not quite out of necessity, make judgements, form desires, make the world into a particular kind of (neoliberal) place” (Davies 2005, p. 1). Modern university spaces can here be framed in terms of being formative megamachines for living that actively produce performative neoliberal subjectivities (with all their necessary actions and desires), or what we might call at the subjective level of our fractal analysis neoliberal beings (after scholars such as Tonna (2007), Davies and Bansel (2007), Dahlström (2008), Thompson and Cook  (2012)). Dahlström offers a rough formulation of what a neoliberal being is based on the writing of Davies, and in case you were wondering if the body snatchers have you too, ask yourself this: Are you “a person defined and locked into a notion of consumption, characterised as a person with own responsibility having a flexible mind that lives a life based on a notion of an individual entrepreneurial autonomy, [and] whose busyness is a sign of ‘being someone’ within a system that creates intensified working conditions under a culture of surveillance and you might ask, what’s wrong with that, and by that question you confirm the matrix we are locked into” (Dahlström 2008). 14. From around 2014–2015 UNNC PDPR was further abstracted into five database columns (recalling the five pillars at the end of the universe in the Monkey King stories) or “Competency Groups”: (1) Achieving and Delivering; (2) Personal Effectiveness; (3) Working Together; (4) Thinking and Innovation; and (5) Managing, Leading and Developing Others. Within these columns were embedded a further fifteen subcategories, including things like: Drive for Results; Quality Focus; Organising and Flexibility; Confidence and Self-Control; Problem Solving and Initiative; Communicating with Clarity. And while space forecloses any engagement

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with the subsets of these subsets, we might here link them to how teacher-­ subjects in self-evaluating and justifying themselves through this form of matrix might be thought of as becoming a form of Standardised Teacher (see e.g. Boxley 2003), defined in terms of a technical practitioner or “knowledge manager”—whose performed role becomes averse to any “risks, unpredictability and … magic” (Tonna 2007). 15. Adopting Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology, psychologist Katerina Zabrodska et al. view bullying as another of the most insidious institutionalised “intra-active process” coimplicated in the organisation of corporate universities. Something that factors into the mental unhealth of its workforce. Inside neoliberal universities like UNNC, bullies, victims, perpetrators and witnesses alike tend to normalise and “diffract” these experiences and actions (of our own and others’ bullying) through the managerial discourses and technologies (of power and knowledge) that foster them (Zabrodska et  al. 2013, p.  709). Bullying is systemic, in fact, or rather manifest through existing power relations to such an extent that either bullying or being bullied has become the “normal mode” of modern “academic life” (ibid.). Here, bullying is coimplicated and justified by the “alleged need for control and improvement of our performance” (Zabrodska et al. 2013, p. 717). For example, one author was told: “Get in a research cluster, or else perish.” 16. At the time of writing the Universities and College Union in the UK are striking on a four-front battle to win staff fair pay and fair pensions, demand reduced workloads, and counter the sector’s increasing casualisation of contracts and reliance on zero hour contracts. See e.g. https://ucu.org. uk/heaction. 17. As introduced on his website, “[Brent Puffer] is described as the World’s ‘Mr Employee Experience’ and works at the forefront of the employee experience movement. [Brent’s] mission is to create organisations where people belong, find meaning, and co-create astonishing human achievements. [Brent] regularly advises and works with the World’s leading organisations exclusively focusing on the employee experience. [Brent] is the Founder & CEO of the World Employee Experience Institute (WEEI)— an independent employee experience company.” 18. The description for this video on YouTube is: “This video was initiated & produced by students of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China for 4  weeks, just for one common anticipation: inviting Jack Ma to be the guest professor of UNNC, to share & learn his ideas, and spread them around the world!” To date the video has 187 views, accessible here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhy-PXSyg3Y&t=56s. 19. https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/hr/job-opportunities/jobs.aspx. 20. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/05/starbucks-is-opening-a-store-inchina-every-15-hours.html. 21. https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/events/2018/r-u-ok-week.aspx. 22. https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/dcl/ruok.aspx.

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References Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). London: Verso. Avery-Phipps. (2015, Feburary 27). Nottingham Ningbo Students Produce Video Reaching Out To China’s Richest Man!. LinkedIn. Retreived from https:// www.linkedin.com/pulse/nottingham-ningbo-students-produce-video-reachingout-avery-phipps Baudrillard, J. (2014). After Utopia: The Primitive Society of the Future. In R.  G. Smith & D.  B. Clarke (Eds.), Jean Baudrillard: From Hyperreality to Disappearance: Uncollected Interviews (pp.  24–28). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Berardi, F. B. (2015). Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso. Blommaert, J. (2012). Sociolinguistics and English Language Studies. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, Paper 85. Bolton, K. (2002). Chinese Englishes: From Canton Jargon to Global English. World Englishes, 21(2), 181–199. Boxley, S. (2003). Performativity and Capital in Schools. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 1(1). Retrieved from http://www.jceps.com/wp-­ content/uploads/PDFs/01-1-03.pdf Brody, R. (2011, April 8). China Bans Time Travel. The New Yorker. Retreived From https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/china-bans-time-travel Brown, M. S., Evers, C., Fleming, D. H., Gilardi, F., & Reid, J. (2017). Transmedial Projects, Scholarly Habitus, and Critical Know-How in a British University in China. International Journal of Transmedia Literacy, 3, 45–68. https://doi. org/10.7358/ijtl-2017-003-gila. Champagne, J. (2011). Teaching in the Corporate University: Assessment as Labor Issue. AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom., 2, 1–25. Retrieved from https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Champagne.pdf. Chen, Y-H., Harrison, S. & R. Weekly. (2019) “I don’t have communicate ability”: Deviations in an L2 multimodal corpus of academic English from an EMI university in China – errors or ELF? In Parviainen, H., Kaunisto, M. & Pahta, P. (eds.). Corpus Approaches into World Englishes and Language Contrasts. Varieng, Vol. 20. Clarke, D.  B. (2003). The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City. London: Routledge. Curnock, H. (2014, September 24). A Bird’s Eye View: Climbing the University of Nottingham’s Trent Building Clock Tower. University of Nottingham Blogs. Retrieved from https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/alumnilife/2014/09/24/abirds-eye-view-climbing-the-university-of-nottingham-trent-buildingclock-tower/. Dahlström, L. (2008, May 27–29). Neoliberal Contexts and Education Critical Intellectual Work—An Endangered Tradition Under Neoliberal Regimes. A Paper Presented at Meeting Global Challenges in Research Cooperation—A Human Rights Perspective, Uppsala, Sweden.

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Dahlstrom, L. (2009). Education in a Post-Neoliberal Era: A Promising Future for the Global South? Power and Education, 1(2), 167–177. Davies, B. (2005). The (Im)possibility of Intellectual Work in Neoliberal Regimes. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 26(1), 1–14. Davies, B., & Bansel, P. (2005). The Time of Their Lives? Academic Workers in Neoliberal Time(s). Health Sociology Review, 14, 47–58. Davies, B & Bansel, P. (2007). Neoliberalism and Education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(3), 247–259. Debord, G. & Wolman, G. J. (2007). A Users Guide to Detournment. In Knabb, K. Ed. Situationist International Anthology (pp.14-20). Berkley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets. DeLanda, M. (2000). A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Swerve. Deleuze, G. (1997). Postscript to Societies of Control. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2005). Cinema 2: The Time-Image (H.  Tomlinson & R.  Galeta, Trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2011). What Is Philosophy? (H.  Tomlinson & G. Burchill, Trans.). London: Verso. Dinan, William & Miller, David (Eds). (2007). Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy  – Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy. London: Pluto Press. Dussel, E. (2013). Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalisation and Exclusion. Durham: Duke University Press. Epstein, J. (1981). Myths of Total Cinema. London: Afterimage. Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York, NY: Basic Books. Fazackerley, A., & Worthington, P. (2007). British Universities in China: The Reality Beyond the Rhetoric [An Agora Discussion Paper]. Retrieved from https://academiccouncil.duke.edu/sites/default/files/u6/ AC-pdfs/09-10/11-19-09/Agora-China-Report1.pdf. Fleming, D. H. (2011). Chen Kaige: Famous Stars Shoot Movie in Ningbo. The Ningbo Guide, 5(7), 16–17. Fleming, D. H. (2014). Deleuze, the ‘(Si)neo-realist’ Break, and the Emergence of Chinese Any-now(here)-spaces. Deleuze Studies, 8(4), 509–541. Harbord, J. (2019). Greta Gerwig’s Gestures: Agamben in the Land of Stardom. Film-Philosophy, 23(2), 177–193. Harris, T. A. (1967). I’m OK—You’re OK. London: Harper & Row. Hedges, C. (2009). Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. London: Nation Books. Hill, D. (2004). Books, Banks and Bullets: Controlling Our Minds-The Global Project of Imperialistic and Militaristic Neoliberalism and its Effects on Educational Policy. Policy Futures. 2(3), 504–522. Hilo, C. (2007). Negotiating Global/Local Identities: Jia Zhangke’s The World. Mediascape: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Spring). Retrieved from http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Spring07_NegotiatingGlobalLocal.pdf.

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Jaffee, V. (2006). ‘Every Man A Star’: The Ambivalent Cult of Amateur Art in New Chinese Documentaries. In P.  Pickowicz & Y.  Zhang (Eds.), From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (pp. 77–108). New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. Jenkins, J. (2011). Accommodating (to) ELF in the International University. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 926–936. Jessop, B. (2003). From Thatcherism to New Labour: Neo-Liberalism, Workfarism, and Labour Market Regulation. Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. Retreived from http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc131rj.pdf Jia, Z. (2010). Speaking of ‘The Sixth Generation’: I Don’t Believe That You Can Predict Our Ending, dGeneratefilms. Retrieved December 20, 2015, from http://dgeneratefilms.com/academia/52full-translation-of-jia-zhangkesessay-on-sixth-generation-cinema-nowavailable/. Li, D. L. (2016). Economy, Emotion and Ethics in Chinese Cinema: Globalization on Speed. London and New York: Routledge. Liptak, A. (2015, December 11). Narratives of Modernization: China’s History of Science Fiction. Barnes & Noble: Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog. Retrieved from https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/narratives-ofmodernization-chinas-history-of-science-fiction/. Lovell, J. (2012). The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China. Picador. Mortensen, J. (2014). Language Policy from Below: Language Choice in Student Project Groups in a Multilingual University Setting. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 35(4), 425–442. Mumford, L. (2010). Technics and Civilisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nancy, J-L., & Barrau, A. (2015). What’s These Worlds Coming To? (T. Holloway & F. Méchain, Trans.). New York: Fordham University Press. Nguyen, B.  T. T., & Pennycook, A. (2018). Dancing, Google and Fish Sauce: Vietnamese Students Coping with Australian Universities. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 38(4), 457–472. Onsman, A., & Cameron, J. (2014). Democracy and International Higher Education in China. Australian Universities Review, 56(2), 3–19. Peters, J. D. (2013). Calendar, Clock, Tower. In J. Stolow (Ed.), Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology and the Things in Between (pp.  25–42). New  York: Fordham University Press. Prince, C., & Beaver, G. (1999). The Rise and Rise of the Corporate University: The Emerging Corporate Learning Agenda. The International Journal of Management Education, 1(2), 7–26. QAA. (2012). Review of UK Transnational Education in China: The University of Nottingham Ningbo Campus. Retrieved from https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/ qaa/international/university-of-nottingham-ningbo-campus-tne-12. pdf?sfvrsn=d43af481_2. Readings, B. (1997). The University in Ruins. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

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Schivelbusch, W. (1993). Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. Vintage Books. Scott, J.  D. (2014). Memoir as a Form of Auto-Ethnographic Research for Exploring the Practice of Transnational Higher Education in China. Higher Education Research & Development, 33(4), 757–768. Thompson, G., & Cook, I. (2012). Spinning in the NAPLAN Ether: ‘Postscript on the Control Societies’ and the Seduction of Education in Australia. Deleuze Studies, 6(4), 564–584. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. Tonna, M. A. (2007). Teacher Education in a Globalized Age. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 5(1) Retrieved from http://www.jceps.com/print. php?articleID=88. Whitty, G. (1997). Marketization, the State, and the Reformation of the Teaching Profession. In A. H. Halsey, H. Lauder, P. Brown, & A. Stuart Wells (Eds.), Education, Culture and Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wikipedia (2019). University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Nottingham_Malaysia_Campus. Zabrodska, K., Linnel, S., Laws, C., & Davies, B. (2013). Bullying as Intra-active Process in Neoliberal Universities. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(5), 709–719. Retrieved from http://qix.sagepub.com/content/17/8/709.full.pdf+html. Zhang, J. (2014). Death Ray on a Coral Island as China’s First Science Fiction Film. In S. Fritzsche (Ed.), The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film (pp. 39–55). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Filmography Fengkuang yingyu/Crazy English. Directed by Yuan Zhang. 1999. Frances Ha. Directed by Noah Baumbach. 2012. Liu Lang Di Qiu/The Wandering Earth. Directed by Frant Gwo. 2019. Mistress America. Directed by Noah Baumbach. 2015. Red Dead Redemption. Rockstar Games. 2010. Red Dead redemption II. Rockstar Games. 2018. Shanhu Dao Shang de Siguang/Death Ray on a Coral Island. Directed by Hongmei Zhang. 1980. Shije/The World. Directed by Zhangke Jia. 2004. Sou suo/Caught in the Web. Directed by Kaige Chen. 2012. The Magnificent Seven. Directed by John Sturges. 1960. Westworld. Directed by Michael Crichton. 1973. Westworld. [TV Series] Created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. 2016–.

CHAPTER 6

Shi-Nematic Games (Casino Capitalism)

Everyone—from regional governments to the central government— depend on playing the real estate game. How do you play? You can’t let it get too hot. —Li Guoping in Fincher (2014, p. 96) I want to suggest—without too much hesitation or qualification— that the casino system provides a near-perfect analogy for the consumer society. —David B. Clarke (2003, p. 12) For the great difference between an ordinary casino which you can go into or stay away from, and the global casino of high finance, is that in the latter all of us are involuntarily engaged in the day’s play. […] The financial casino has everyone playing the game of Snakes and Ladders. —Susan Strange (2015, p. 2)

As many readers will know, an outing in China would be incomplete without at some point ending up in one of the brand new multistorey multisensory shopping malls that have become emblematic of China’s economic development and enthrallment with consumerism. In recognition of this, Chinese Urban Shi-nema’s fourth case study uses a complex architectural assemblage that is—but is also much more than—a shopping mall as its terminus point: Bali Sunday. This is a mall, apartment complex and boutique hotel all rolled into one techno-capital urban assemblage (Beller © The Author(s) 2020 D. H. Fleming, S. Harrison, Chinese Urban Shi-nema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3_6

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2006, p. 12). It is a modern Chinese machine for living that attempts to erase the rigid distinctions between culture and industry, looking and labour, living and shopping, playing and paying by paradigmatically transforming the broader (Chinese and here Bali Sunday) community into a ludic mall space writ large (see e.g. Ritzer 1998 and Baudrillard 1998, pp. 26–7ff). For various reasons, Bali Sunday will provide a fitting perch for our final case study. First and foremost, it offers a sequel to the showrooms we visited in Chap. 3. Bali Sunday is the realisation of the complex where our key participant chose to invest her three million RMB. Sold to her during the showroom visits was a 138 m2 portion of space above a building site that would become her dream apartment. Accordingly this space, like the other urban arrangements to be studied in this chapter, sprung up in the period spanning 2016 to 2018, rising from what had previously been but mud and sand, dirt, or a “half-glimpsed space of not-yet” (Pahl and Pool 2020). Which is to say, the temporalised spaces of inbetweenness whose poles (their before and after) constitute what we have been calling the any(now)here-spaces of postsocialist Chinese modernity (see also Fleming 2014a, 2014b). Secondly, Bali Sunday was a proverbial stone’s throw from the UNNC campus (cf. Chap. 5), meaning that we could regularly visit its premises as they evolved, sampling the various sights, sounds (including the skeuomorphic UNNC bells which could be heard from the upper floors) and smells it began emitting as the lot developed in proportion and dimension. Meaning, along with other citizens living in this part of the city, we were able to witness and experience (not just see and hear about) how this massive complex rapidly evolved from an empty lot-cum-building site into a smooth and sleek aspirational living/shopping environment, replete with a thirty-five-storey luxury hotel called Bali Holiday. Thirdly, Bali Sunday became a terminus or portal that opened up the analysis of several other articulated places, or nested assemblages, that likewise channel and express (through their significant form and gamified content) the frenzied logic of what has variously been called “casino capitalism.” As our chapter’s three-tined masthead collectively indicates (see opening quotes), this notion forms an expansive one-dimensional system that increasingly desublimates all Chinese citizen-p(l)ayers within a wider reward structure matrix. Bali Sunday shed light on this “fantastic cage” in which the proverbial house not only always wins but there is no real outside (for cashing out and exiting into) to speak of.

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Our case is built by accompanying X through not only her apartment-­ buying process (Chap. 3) but also the apartment-building and apartment-­ decorating processes, being with her from plot visit to sale, through interior design, to installation in the premises and within a growing calculus of objects, wherein we also observed how our participant and her partner Y began to live/shop in the extended shopping culture. This intimacy with our participant’s goings on also brought us into contact with a range of different actors. Property moguls, interior design companies, builders, commercial tenants, migrant workers, customers (accompanied by their grandparents and children), government officials and a range of non-­ human animals—all of whom not only became part of the broader shi-­ nematic assemblage but appeared somehow sublimated within a wider network of gamified structures and properties. That is, the same ludic diagram (read gamified statistical graph-space) undergirded their set-ups and arrangements, with all these ultimately being designed to divest p(l) ayers of their money. On account of this, this chapter works to draw parallels between the dramas that played out in these urban settings with the staging of various games—ranging from wealth-generation and morality-lesson board games (e.g. Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders) to syndicated game shows (e.g. The Price Is Right, Wheel of Fortune) and reality TV shows popular in China’s contemporary attention economy (e.g. If You Are the One, The Voice of China.). Games aside for now, we begin by continuing our broader methodological effort of hanging each chapter’s shi-nematic arrangements alongside companion examples of contemporaneous Chinese film. While an obvious choice here might be to turn to gambling films, we instead begin by foregrounding a peculiar category of modern Chinese film predominantly associated with box-office gamification and financial manipulation, which in the last analysis is primarily designed to win the film’s financial investors large returns on their money, rather than gaining the production team industry awards or artistic plaudits. For various reasons we opt to refrain from naming specific examples of these products here (leaving the detective work for future film and economic historians) and instead point to a broad cycle of contemporaneous (phantasmagorical?) commercial production that we here label shi-t(rick) casino cinema, this being the type of economic cinema that clearly crystallises the logic of casino capitalism.

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Shi-t(rick) Chinese Cinema Looking to early film history, Tom Gunning (2016) famously argued that it was the spectacular tricks that the new cinematic technologies were able to perform that attracted (the attention of) earliest viewers. Thereafter, although the “cinema of attractions” became metabolised by an increasingly narrative form, throughout film history the draw of technological tricks periodically resurfaced to draw new audiences back in (synchronised sound, TechniColour, digital photorealism, etc.). For Christian Metz, the narrative cinema that took over was also, at its core, a massive trick (trucage): “It is in fact essential to know that cinema in its entirety is, in a sense, a vast trucage” (1977, p. 670). The reality effect that most narrative cinema requires to operate, for example, depends upon playing tricks with what is seen and unseen, with invisible editing techniques being one example that viewers literally do not see. For others like Colin McCabe, Hollywood realism—which became a kind of ideological standard around the globe—was likewise a symptomatic trick, not least because the rationalised industry deliberately elided or screened out (of the viewer’s attention) all of the (unglamorous) behind the scenes workers and labour (1974). In China, “Huallywood” (see e.g. Fleming and Indelicato 2019) films coextensive with our historical period of study started to perform another form of trick that toyed with notions of what was seen and unseen, visible and invisible. Unlike the tricks associated with the early cinematic technologies or the rationalised industry procedures, though, this was more precisely a financial or economic trick fitting for the millennial era of global semiocapitalism and casino culture. An indicative BBC article published in 2018 entitled “Movie Madness: Why Chinese Cinemas Are Empty but Full” helps us get to the core of this particular historical trick (McDonell 2018). Through journalism, Stephen McDonell exposes an emerging phenomenon associated with Chinese commercial flops that nevertheless appeared to be selling out to full houses across the country. To put this in context, the Chinese film critic and industry observer Raymond Zhou explains that the success of certain commercial Chinese movies had led to higher profits for private backers and investors. In light of this some financial speculators began viewing “the rise of the stock price as the ultimate goal [of Chinese filmmaking]” (McDonell 2018). So far so good, but Zhou continues:

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When you have a hit film, your stock price will go up several times in terms of market valuation compared with the grosses from the box office so some “financial genius,” came up with this idea: Why don’t I have fake box office numbers so that I can make much more money from the stock market? (Zhou in McDonell 2018)

For a short time, certain investors thus began backing Chinese movies “with the sole goal of boosting their stock price that can shift on the perception of a movie’s performance, irrespective of its true popularity” (ibid.). What became most alarming to Zhou was this: people with clear invested interests, if you will, such as cinema exhibition chains and social media companies, started teaming up to generate phantom ticket sales and fake social media hype about the films they had backed. Or again, as Ben Arnold puts it, financial investors began “buying out ‘entire late night screenings’ to make movies seem more popular than they are, leading to a bump in share value, despite some screenings being completely empty” (2018). In a distant echo of the fictional storyline of The Producers (Mel Brookes 1967), Chinese companies began using film production and semiocapitalist signs to game the financial market. Which is to say, they were gaming the system to generate financial windfalls (and assist in exporting financial funds from China to escape its tight financial regulation system). Accordingly, while producing a real hit film remained as difficult as it always has been, under this casino system various powerful p(l)ayers began backing private Huallywood products and manipulating the semiocapital data and codes surrounding the film’s domestic release in order to manufacture profits for future funding and diversifying investments. In such manoeuvres (betting against and on failure) we can no doubt detect the logic of casino capitalism at work behind the scenes and screens of contemporary Chinese cinema, which, like the Las Vegas and Macau architectural machines, mask their tricks and downsides behind glitzy projections of light and magic (see e.g. Clarke 2003, p. 12). In the remainder of this chapter, we aim to expose and make sense of the experience of comparable gambles and financial hedges through a fractalactic shi-nematic framework, while interweaving threads that are both theoretical and empirical (including video-recorded observations and interview data). As in previous chapters, our notion of the cinema broadens from the screen and moving images to the substratum of contemporary social perceptions and desires, which today is more often than not

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interpreted through or in relation to screens anyway. The experience of living is always already mediated, augmented or hyperreal.

Let There Be Lights … and Keys Worth mentioning as a starting point for our forthcoming considerations of becoming-cinema or becoming-light was the unexpected light pollution that was generated by the mall and hotel at Bali Sunday. In addition to the illuminated billboards outside (discussed in more detail below) ubiquitous LED lighting panels covered the sides of both the mall and the thirty-five-storey Bali Holiday hotel. Indeed, similar to a Las Vegas façade, the latter would project bold flashing light displays out into the night sky, ranging from psychedelic patterns to moving grid lines with occasional animations of blue skies and white clouds (designed to mask the environmental downside of casino capitalism by green-washing the mall’s pollution?). With the mall and hotel going up first, the building of the domestic premises was scheduled to be completed by 31 December 2016, on which date the homeowners were supposed to receive their keys. However, the keys were only handed over three months later (1 April 2017), this delay causing scenes not unlike a form of (post)socialist revolutionary cinema. For, at about the two-month delay mark, the rebelling and exacerbated homeowners rose up against the commercial owners, stormed the management building and collectively demanded the keys to their newly purchased apartments—or domestic machines for living. Subsequently, the property magnate who owned the Bali Sunday enterprise called a meeting to directly address the homeowners, many of whom arrived and immediately began recording their actions with their smartphones (cinema-­ machines), live-streaming the unfolding events across social media platforms. According to the speaker, the problem was global in its magnitude. At least, the magnate blamed the delay on the timing of G20 (eleventh meeting) that was currently being held in nearby Hangzhou and chaired by President Xi, arguing that security measurements and manufacturing restrictions (e.g. to clean up the air in the surrounding environment) had disrupted the property building process (factories and building sites having been commanded to down tools during the build-up to the international event). This regional delay inconvenienced the buyers, but their frustration was financially recompensed, as according to the purchase

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contracts, the developers were required to forfeit a percentage of the sale price for every day beyond the due date. In such measures we can locate the Chinese government ensuring that the local real estate market does not become too volatile, or perceived as a bad investment, at the same time as another scene at a different scale of perception is also stage managed and manipulated in order to conform to another geopolitical reality. Whether or not engineering the environment to appear cleaner in the short term had any effect on the international G20 visitors may be up for debate. At the social and subjective level of analysis, the real estate legality served to benefit homeowners, albeit by hegemonically paying out more to those customers who had bought the more expensive lots. Our key participant began totting up 850 RMB per day for the first two months of the delay period, until, at the two-month mark, her fee increased to 1200 RMB per day, which was also retroactively applied to the two months of reimbursements accrued so far. “Payout time!” This payout arrived in a lump sum compensation fee of 10,000 RMB for the inconvenience and delay when X finally received her keys. However, this payout was fated to pay back into the national economy as a new system of objects was now required to furnish and decorate the otherwise empty shell. But that stage of the story comes after X’s initial confrontation with the empty rooms and down-to-earth reality that had replaced the fantasy projections of her purchased shi-nematic (lifestyle) dream.

Spot the Difference, Cat and Mouse Worth repeating at this stage is Metz and McCabe’s arguments that one of the most common tricks related to the making visible of commercial cine-­ fantasies lies in their editing out, or elision, of the less glamorous behind-­ the-­scenes crews: editors and armies of workers including caterers, grips, drivers, whose labour helps produce the verisimilar cinematic illusions. Such ideological tricks, or plays with the visible and the invisible, are also a pertinent feature of aspirational Chinese cinema and shi-nema. With respect to the latter, upon finally receiving her keys, X gained access to the complex grounds and to her new dream apartment space for the first time. However, pictures and videos of her arrival serve testimony to what we might call the undesirable re-intrusion of the Real, courtesy of an encounter with a typically screened out, behind the scenes, laborious reality that was not part of the projected hyperreal dream she had been sold in and around the showrooms (c.f. Chap. 3). Indeed, X’s visit to the site of

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construction, as does any visit to the set of a film shoot, necessarily drew her attention to all the real graft going on behind the scenes of the dream machine. Figure 6.1 apposes several framegrabs to illustrate the materiality of the space that X had been pressured into purchasing. For the first time, our key participant was confronted with the reality of an empty concrete shell and construction work, the real dirt and grime of the building site, and the windowless constructions that were radically open to the smog and elements (non-atmospheric air). What also became salient in these site visits was the new cast of backgrounded actors that had so far been excluded from the slick commercial presentations, and whose appearance in her on-­ the-­spot films and pictures become reminiscent of the migrant characters, systematically excluded, undeserving poor and other left behind precariats of the Urban Generation movement (cf. Chap. 4). As X takes an external service elevator attached to the building’s scaffolding, for example, a migrant woman pops out from behind a strategically positioned red curtain or partition and, after taking an order from the real estate agent, manually punches in their floor number before moving back behind the material screen for the duration of the slow vertical ride. On X’s arrival at the apartment, another worker dashes from the construction set, evidently following instructions to not disrupt visitors to their new apartment spaces.

Fig. 6.1  Encounter with the building site

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Around X an array of less opulent prop-like elements, including wheelbarrows, gloves, trestles and building equipment, now litter the site/sight. A makeshift crapper and a builder’s ablution coiled on the bare concrete floor reveals the bare working conditions (understandable, of course, when one considers the distance down to the workers portaloo on the construction site from this thirty-second-floor empty concrete shell and the difficulty in hailing the makedo lift). X is visibly shocked by the intrusion of a shit within the midst of her lifestyle dream—this turd, along with the packaging ripped off her newly delivered furniture and used ad hoc to wipe the worker’s rear, requires her to confront an altogether different or parallel world.1 Provoked by these intrusions of the real, as X leaves the shitty apartment that evening, she autodidactically becomes a form of “iGeneration” (see e.g. Berry 2014) filmmaker, further documenting on her smartphone a nocturnal detachment of migrant workers being bussed in to sweep up the accumulated dust from the day’s work in the annexed mall. In such gestures we can perhaps map links with a range of other gritty on-the-spot films produced by iGeneration and Urban Generation filmmakers, whose work documents the unofficial underbelly of Chinese modernity and the plight of the migrant labourers needed to drive it forward (see inter alia Braester 2007, 2010, 2012; Zhang Zhen 2007; Lu 2007; Fleming 2014a, 2014b; Li 2016). Upon looking over her balcony, X’s encounter with the “Balinese garden” indicates she was also let down by the meagre appearance of the trees. As she first gazed into the grounds, we interviewed X, who recalled to us her frustration and belief at the actual trees that were being placed in the grounds, which were but a poor approximation of the hyperreal ones projected by the animated video advertisements and miniature architectural mock-ups encountered in the showroom. Other discrepancies began to appear inside the apartment too, the most alarming concerning its size—for the apartments had been advertised and sold as being 139 m2, but this figure turned out to be “rounded up” from 138.1 m2. The buyers therefore all experienced another form of shi-nematic trick that we might compare here to the optical effects generated by the use of Ames rooms (areas with slanted geometries that serve to generate spatial or perspectival illusions when screened). Indeed, it now appeared that the original figure of 139  m2 had referred only to the exterior outline of the apartment, including the walls, communal lobby, lift shaft and fire escapes. But as architects and interior designers pointed out upon entering the lots, the

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actual workable living space was really only 111 m2. This unforeseen collapsing of space (or illusion of the bodies inside inflating similar to Alice in Wonderland) was just the first play in a number of stages through which the shape of the apartments shifted and warped, as the homeowners began to re-engineer the space. For example, the owners of smaller apartments attempted to “build out” their apartments into a cavity originally designed to house the AC unit. This led to further construction work that had not been planned, prolonging both the noise and construction pollution. And because this extra work needed to be hidden, it required an unsightly strip of tarpaulin to be draped down the part of the building to be reconfigured. Other homeowners were appalled by the aesthetic affront of this blue screen within their lifestyle dreamscape. If you purchase 112 m2 written on the deeds of the house, then that is only what you can have. This triggered an intervention by government officials who demanded that all extra construction work immediately be stopped. Any work that had already been done to convert the AC cavity into an extension of the apartment now had to be reversed, leading to further construction and waste, as well to the emergence of a new “duel” or “us and them” situation erected between the owners of the smaller and larger apartments. True to a culture caught up in a semiocapitalist process of becoming-­ image, many of these arguments played out on and through screens, predominantly in a social media WeChat group that was formed by the occupants. The different threads and subgroups that emerged illustrated to us how this community very quickly structured itself along economic lines, setting up divisions between homeowners and tenants, then within the homeowners group between the larger apartments and the smaller ones (139 m2 or 112 m2). That is, group subjects began to form with collective identities cohering around the size and/or function of the property purchased, which led to new frustrations and tensions that occasionally spilled over, with  at least one case  resulting in a squabble in  the building’s parking lot. Later, further splits emerged along a vertical alignment too, that is, not only in relation to the size of apartments but their relative height above the ground level. This division first became evident when a new refuse unit was installed at the back of the community in anticipation of the waste from the restaurants in the mall with which the apartment complex was to become integrated. This was patently going to deliver smells and noise that were not indexed in the slick and odourless hyperreal dream packages, but also bring the lower-level owners into uncomfortable contact with

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other kinds of undesirable body: the “underserving poor,” embodied in migrant street cleaners on trikes. Thus, in a distant echo of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), or the more recent Hua li shang ban zu/Design for Living (2015; cf. Chap. 3), the aspirational associations with verticality and affluence (see e.g. Khoo 2019) led to a prevailing view that living higher up was tantamount to living better, this coding or mapping having been foreshadowed by the pricing structure of the apartments from the outset (cf. the ‘Price Wall’ in Chap. 3). Of significance to this broader project, the skeuomorphic and semiocapitalist sounds of the reassuringly expensive Nottingham bells could also only be heard from the higher, more affluent and aspirational, floors. Following government regulations, the apartments had each been equipped with a standard water heating unit and safety railings on the windows. However, when the interior design and decoration process began, the first action many owners took was to rip these out, then knock down any non-load bearing walls with the goal of maximising their liveable space. This invariably generated a lot of waste, which became heaped into an unsightly midden of rubble, piping and twisted metal that rapidly built up at the foot of each apartment block, occasioning the closure of one of the emergency exits. Furthermore, the sledge-hammering of partition walls had created a layer of toxic dust now choking the freshly planted gardens. Recasting Giorgio Agamben’s arguments about gestures becoming citational, or Marcel Mauss’s observations concerning the spread of gaits and styles of moving through the cinema, it is interesting to note how the shi-nematic actions of the Bali Sunday security guards was also soon to become a site/sight of homeowner dissatisfaction. More specifically, the guards’ gestures began to sow dissatisfaction among the WeChat groups, which reported that, in contrast to the military discipline on display around the perimeters of neighbouring gated communities, the Bali Sunday security guards seemed decidedly undisciplined, flustered and disorganised. The owners of the apartments thus connived to withhold the security company’s fee. The company retaliated by subtly withholding services, however, and also undertaking door-to-door canvassing for the remuneration owed. Guerrilla tactics ensued in this fight for salaries, with the guards initially changing the code to the front gates, for instance, meaning that the owners now had to report to the central office to update their pass cards (where they could also be petitioned for their outstanding fee). Recalling that the notion of shi originally stemmed from the world of warfare and battles, it is interesting to observe how screens and images here played an integral part in the unfolding game of Cat and Mouse

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between different stakeholders or members of the modern mall-­ community. In response to the changing of the access codes, for example, some apartment owners circulated alternative access routes in the WeChat groups, instructing fellow owners to enter the grounds via the semi-open mall. Detecting this latter weak point, the management barred  this entrance. As the tone of WeChat messages directed at the management grew harsher, some residents created dialectical montage comparisons between Bali Sunday and other surrounding housing estates, showing the latter to be in much better shape, such as by pointing out whose grounds and security guards where the most (aesthetically) pleasing. Eventually there was a stalemate, as the management company agreed to upgrade the services and the customers agreed to pay (if such improvements were indeed carried through).

The Price is Right, Speed Dating Designers, the Pied Piper, Golden Eggs and Talking Birds If Chap. 3 closed with what appeared to be a happy ending for X, we here pick up what could essentially be framed as the shi-nematic sequel to our first aspirational realisation. For now that X had become what is colloquially known as a fangnu (meaning “house-slave” or someone tied down to an expensive mortgage, see e.g. Fincher 2014, p. 86), the inherent properties of Chinese property occasioned a whole host of new challenges, duels and adventures that suddenly began to incurve towards her, demanding ever more (trans)actions and responses. Or, by way of a tag line, as X herself put it: “You think you have paid for the apartment, but [then] an endless list of new people to pay suddenly crops up.” At about this time, other homeowners were starting to move into their apartments. X and Y’s attention would regularly be pricked by a firework display announcing the arrival of a new bride and groom cortege into the complex grounds. Linked to a reimagined and repurposed wedding tradition, the groom takes the bride back to their new home, where they are greeted by their family and wedding guests. These events required various preparations (montaged in Fig. 6.2), such as strips of red carpet being laid on the ground, replete with a team of photographers and filmmakers documenting every moment, including the welcoming fireworks display and the throwing of confetti. X documented one event where the couple had

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Fig. 6.2  Wedding traditions reimagined in the grounds of Bali Sunday

hired a fleet of mini coopers, which were lined up in the Bali Sunday community—an image reminiscent of several Douyin clips showing a similar cortege of TESLA SUVs, whose doors can flap like wings, or to Western cinematic eyes the 2003 product placed remake of the Italian Job (2003). As was the case from week to week, as these branded British cars arrived in the Bali Sunday complex, caretakers and security guards made sure that the screenscape’s fountains were turned on (in anticipation of the wedding film and its mise-en-scène) and at least one of the guards would stand to attention and salute the arriving cortege. All this to say, the weddings and the Bali Sunday cast of actors (human and non-human) were conducting themselves as though under a magic spell for the benefit of cameras or smartphones (see e.g. Flusser 1983, p. 48; Brown 2019, p. 246). Thus began the start of several stages in which flatbed truck after flatbed truck carrying two to three cubic metres of materials and chemicals— including sand and water (for cement), glass, paint, waterproof flooring, cables, floor boarding, living units (kitchens, bathrooms, etc.) and wallpapers/linings—began arriving in the grounds and disappearing into the basement, where they were unloaded and their wares shuttled up the elevators into the various apartments. Sourcing and fitting these resources occasioned visits to various interior design malls. This revealed a host of

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other background actors and players, including architects, interior design companies, plasterers, brickies, electricians, tilers, air conditioning mechanics, and waste workers—each with their own range of tools and instruments supporting the work of this network, as well as their own motivations and aspirations, and combinatorial games or set-ups. Articulated local economies began synchronically feeding off the development of the mall world, leading to the emergence of various micro monopolies and localised sub-economies. We must recognise at this stage that the purchasing of property is a form of high-stakes gamble for many, tied to projections of rising real estate prices. Or again, some p(l)ayers purchase apartments as an investment rather than as a home, only to leave them untouched while the prices rise, with a view to selling them a few years later for a profit, at which point its decoration work can begin. Thus many eyesore mao pi (毛坯) apartments (empty shells) remained around X’s dream apartment, which served to increase the amount of pollution, deterioration and waste, not least by staggering out the onset of apartment decoration and leaving the building open to the elements at certain points. This delay of sealing and decorating the apartment spaces also prolonged the noise, with residents of this complex expecting to be treated to the sounds of construction work for the next several years. Combined with new developments popping up, a never-ending flow of construction work seemed to be characteristic of this district of Ningbo. Having said that, we now know that shortly after collecting the observations reported here, a new government regulation came into play making Bali Sunday the last grounds in this district to be sold as mao pi. This can be read as a state-level policy response to heated and contentious issues that needed to be avoided, as per our masthead, in order to keep the real estate investment game alluring. All apartments henceforth are required to be decorated upon purchase (精装修 jing zhuang xiu). Unlike people who might purchase today, then, the owners of Bali Sunday apartments were in charge of interior design and decoration. And for this, there were several interior design outlets across the city, allowing us to observe how occupants began sourcing materials locally from warehouses and malls. At these places, it was not simply a case of buying a system of objects to place in the empty house (as per IKEA) but rather becoming involved in various participatory games. Two interior design sites emerge as particularly revealing cases in point: a major decoration products expo and a local mall.

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Ningbo Expo A blue-bowed rigid VIP card invitation was hand-delivered to our participant inviting her to the first of these sites. The “expo” was taking place in a part of the city that was being touted as “the next CBD” (a serial iteration of the Central Business District model that we earlier encountered next to the Historic Museum in Chap. 4, and here helps to highlight the simulacral nature of these decidedly multi-central business parks). This was a game show like encounter, where we witnessed similar forms of manipulation and non-cooperative predictive principles used to stimulate desire or generate a frantic competitive atmosphere for scarce payoffs, similar to the ones already explored in the showrooms. For example, visitors to the decoration products expo entered a huge warehouse, the layout of which had been structured around a main stage. Before arriving at the main stage, visitors first had to funnel by a table of golden eggs, one of which they should pick and then smash (Fig. 6.3a). Enclosed inside each golden egg was a raffle ticket. The raffle tickets was then entered into a tombola on the main stage, which was manned by a pitchman (Fig.  6.3b), who operated a microphone embalmed in a red wrap-around 100 RMB bill (China’s highest currency denomination

Fig. 6.3  (a) Golden eggs upon entry, (b) pitchman on stage, (c) salesman dangles red envelope, (d) sizeable crowd gathers, (e) live-streaming images from the promotion booths

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thanks to a history of fakes and forgery). The pitchman was then joined by a male sales representative from a particular company (e.g. selling sinks, electric clothes drying hangers, and kitchen hoods). The tombola was here used to select lucky crowd members who became eligible for the special offer about to be made and who were invited to convene at the front of the stage. That is, they have already won the chance to be included in the one-time deal about to be negotiated by the pitchman—the role of whom was to haggle down the salesman on behalf of the audience, who consistently cheered him on. After witnessing this sequence occur several times over, the processes surfaced as a staged event, or scripted haggle and false duel, not too dissimilar from other “staged realities” that were common on contemporaneous CCTV game shows. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the “I would rather cry in a BMW” scandal that was circulated widely through syndicated global media and now boasts its own Wikipedia page.2 The scandal in question stemmed from widespread indignation that was occasioned by a wisecrack made by a twenty-year-old female contestant named Ma Nuo after appearing on the popular televised dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao/If You Are the One. As was commonly reported—in a statement that was held up as an example of Chinese females being detestable materialistic “gold diggers”—Ma quipped to an unemployed potential suitor (who was deemed to be a financially unsuitable match) who asked if she would like to take a bike ride with him: “I’d rather cry in the back of a BMW than smile on the back of a bicycle.” Immediately thereafter, public scorn became channelled towards Ma, who later defended her retort as a creative way to reject her suitor. Saying this, Leta Hong Fincher points out that although this remark has regularly been “pulled out by journalists as proof of the outrageous greed of Chinese women,” what often fails to get mentioned “is that these television shows are heavily scripted. One of the guests who appeared on If You Are the One told me that the show producer fed them lines, which they were required to memorize and recite on the air as a condition of being selected” (Fincher 2014, p. 56, emphasis in original).3 Returning to the staged or rehearsed scene we recorded in the Ningbo decoration products expo, the scripted “bargaining” with the pitchman saw him dramatically turn away, only for the salesman to appear to undermine him by producing from his inside pocket a red envelope, which he proceeded to dangle theatrically above the crowd (Fig. 6.3c). With this action, the salesman coordinates multiple bodies together creating an

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agential configuration or aggregate body. From cognitive science, we know that the experience of being together can become a structure for facilitating types of reasoning, such as preference. Specifically, as the individual bodies collectively jump up and reach for the red envelope, a significant bodily experience becomes shared, which is important because changes in embodied experience are changes in emotion, affect and cognition (Gallagher 2017). We could therefore say that actions are being deployed to encourage the shared thoughts and feelings required for the same kind of groupthink that was also characteristic of the real estate showrooms that we explored earlier. Once a sizeable crowd of customers had gathered in front of the stage (Fig.  6.3d) and a deal had been agreed between the pitchman and the salesman—like on a televised game show—loud music began. Another accomplice emerged, who we hereafter refer to as the Pied Piper, specifically because his job was to lead the gathered customers off to the promotional booth selling the goods being negotiated, which he did by rhythmically rapping the bargain price through a microphone in tune to the music, which encouraged bystanders to also join a developing line reminiscent of a Conga trail. Upon arriving at the booth, the charismatic MC recorded the lively crowd with his smartphone, relaying images from the bustling stalls opposite across various social media platforms (Fig. 6.3e). Such playful, seemingly spontaneous, yet highly developed statistical games were ubiquitous across many of the sales rooms we visited and recorded, even if the games varied according to the type of merchandise and objects being sold. The interior design showroom that X eventually settled on, for example, set up a form of game similar to The Price is Right. Indeed, this Ningbo-based interior design company had hired out big banquet rooms of a boutique hotel in the city (Shangrila), transforming them into a pop-up interior design showroom, where customers could meet with architects under the watch of sales managers on standby to inform them of the various deals the company offers. Having passed through the perfumed lobby of the hotel, customers enter the transformed banquet room through a makeshift hallway that has been embedded into the otherwise open-plan room. In a distant echo of the movement-image screenscapes arrayed in the Ningbo Historic Museum, the first installations that customers/visitors encounter serve to unfurl a teleological narrative of the history of the company, highlighting various milestones which subtly work to assert its capacity and prowess. This merges into the next section, showing the quality and international

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origin of the global products that this (apparently) long-standing company uses. Various pipes, wires and materials now feature on the walls, montaged alongside prominent German flags that symbolise or connote engineering quality. As X turns the corner, the wall changes into a “hall of fame” arrangement, whereupon the top architects that customers can choose are arrayed in hierarchical order, along with short-form CVs and work experience credentials. Having followed the narrativised hallway, customers enter the main set, which is laid out like a speed dating event. Each table is occupied by one of the architects, whose faces are somewhat familiar from their air-brushed virtual selves on the hall of fame wall. One can here discuss the planned lifestyle apartment with these designers, who can share with you their inspirational ideas about popular systems of objects and fashion trends (ranging from modern, to hip, avant-garde, techno-savvy, retro traditional). If the customer is not satisfied with the architect’s proposal, she can move on to the next table to meet a different architect. If not, staying at one table for more than a few minutes appears to trigger the arrival of a sales manager, whose job is to explain the deals and corresponding price ranges—both the sales person and the architect invariably teaming up to pressurise the situation and hasten a desirable form of transactional resolution. Once the customer has committed to working with a particular architect and the sales person has outlined the deal, a flashy female hostess dressed in floor length ball gown interrupts the proceedings to call everyone’s attention to the fact that a deal had been made and to invite the customer up onto the stage. As can be seen in our video of this, the customer arrives on the stage and is handed a hammer, then is instructed to choose and subsequently break one of the golden eggs laid out on a table draped with velvet cloth. The egg here operates as a means of attention control and to help structure another staged interaction designed to render the act of making financial transactions a sign system. That is, the affordances of the golden egg help to erect predetermined courses of action (or require / stimulate embodied actions). Our (tran)script of the host as she takes the lead helps illustrate how a structured interaction now encases the buyer and transforms her into a symbolic p(l)ayer  (punctuation kept  to offer  a sense of her diction, full capitals coding verbal stress, double parentheses to enclose non-linguistic actions, and bold to flag up words or segments of interest): 1. Attention please, CONGRATULATIONS, Miss X, from (name 2. of housing estate), ordered a set of decorations,

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3. CONGRATULATIONS. ((applause)) 4. Let’s welcome Miss X and her- this way, sir 5. CONGRATULATIONS, welcome to our stage, yeah, you can 6. choose one ok 7. (3 second pause)

(a) ((picks and smashes a golden egg with hammer provided))

8. let’s see, what’s this? 9. WOW, CONGRATULATIONS, you have a cabinet voucher. It’s 10. worth 3888 yuan. You have a soft decoration item. ((applause)) 11. CONGRATULATIONS. Please take your voucher. Looking 12. forward to seeing you next time. 13. We have so many presents here waiting for you. Just 14. place an order with us. Throughout, the repetition of the term “congratulations” provides a stylistically and culturally significant enunciation that establishes a rhythmical audio pattern. The sign-symbol of the golden egg embedded within this also adds a layer of suspense (3 second pause, line 7), recoding the activity of making a down payment so that it appears to be a fun game— syncretically combining it with an action and somewhat satisfying effect of breaking open a golden egg made of plaster, which also acts as a symbolic attention-getting device and resolution for the other bodies present. Thereafter, this egg is revealed to contain a raffle ticket that cashed out as 3888 RMB worth of kitchen cabinets (the number 8 indexical in China of prosperity and associated with luck and gambling, and 888 in particular being a configuration often articulated to luck and prosperity in advertising and media products). A fellow employee was also seen filming the interaction, harvesting images of the staged event and projecting the participant as a game show style “lucky winner,” while producing an image-­ commodity that would serve as an endorsement of the company and immediately operate as an affective or agential advert circulating on social media, feeding into the on-going promotion of the company and contributing to the pressure on other would-be buyers to join in or risk missing out on such lucky payoffs. A few weeks later, the designer who X matched up with subsequently sent his draft proposal of the interior design via WeChat. This could be opened and virtually explored through the smartphone interface, which

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allowed the designers to integrate a musical soundtrack into the simulacral viewing experience. The screened software interface here allowed X to zoom in, pan around and open/close doors, projecting what being inside the always already hyperreal apartment and its system of designer objects might be like (see e.g. Baudrillard 1998). Fittingly, this image-product also enabled X to share the video on her own WeChat feed, thus inviting her friends and family to inhabit, play around in, and most importantly envy the virtual (but soon to be actualised) lifestyle apartment. Subsequent meetings with the interior design company took place in the more modest setting of their urban offices. Upon arrival at this location for the first time and entering the lobby, X was greeted by two Minor birds in a cage, which was placed at one end of the reception foyer. As these birds could say “welcome” (four syllables in Chinese: 欢迎光 临 huanying guanglin) while also performing a bow, this presented X with an affective cross-species transaction and irresistible sight/site that she was triggered to film and share via her smartphone. In this iGeneration encounter (see e.g. Berry 2014), we can hear X’s surprise that the birds can talk and gesture (bow). Counterweighing her initial delight of encountering these healthy performing animals, on a repeat visit to these premises X was later to confront a disturbing reality that suggested a form of exploitation associated with this attention-grabbing performance. Indeed, similar phone footage recorded some several months later reveals that one of the birds had died, while the surviving one was now a nervous wreck, flapping around and squawking with very little remaining plumage. Keeping this sad exploitation of birds in mind, we might now move on to consider how the grounds and annex of the embedding mall complex became associated with another species of performative and symbolic bird.

The Peacock, Capitalist Carpet and Wheel of (Starbucks’) Fortune The official entrance to the Bali Sunday housing community was located on a side street behind the mall. This made the main entrance to the mall a more convenient route for apartment owners arriving by foot to access their community. And just as the housing community could be accessed through the mall, the mall could be accessed through a Starbucks outlet, which flanked its main entrance. On entering the mall and heading towards

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the housing community, another such interface between the mall and the housing community is created in the form of an international goods supermarket, which likewise provided an alternative entrance to the community. In this way, we see how living and shopping become blended in a manner reminiscent of Baudrillard’s and Marcuse’s arguments regarding the flattening of life within a one-dimensional consumer society, wherein the shopping centre with its “calculus of objects” becomes the modern “Pantheon—or Pandaemonium” (Baudrillard 1998, p. 38).4 From such a perspective X and Y enter into a consumer universe governed by the dictatorship of signs and fashion, which ideologically instils the idea that all (worthy) eyes are on you. Fittingly, the logo associated with the housing conglomeration X and Y now lived within was a peacock—the male variety of which boasts a spectacular train with a colourful array of symbolic eyespots, often described in terms of one of “nature’s extravagances,” which also functions as a form of libidinal enframing device (or mobile mise-en-scène) that affectively environments the male bird (PBS 2001). For, as with other parts of the world, the peacock in China serves as a symbol for various positive associations, including of wealth, fortune, success and well-being.5 Significantly, as with the story of property ownership as an attractor for a wife in modern Chinese society, the male peacock’s extravagantly decorated train is also recognised as a form of excessive attractor in nature’s “mating game” (PBS 2001). Tellingly, in and around the hypermodern Bali Sunday complex, stylised branded peacock images abound, its train obviously erect. Nevertheless, in this cinematic city and age, the train is of course rendered as a spectrum of seven colours evocative of a screen’s colour gamut (Fig. 6.4), and more

Fig. 6.4  Logo of Bali Sunday: a multicolour peacock (left) and the NBC logo (right)

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specifically the NBC (National Broadcasting Company) peacock logo, first used in the US in 1956. As suggested by our montage in Fig.  6.6, we might observe three tweaked differences that can help differentiate the Bali Sunday and NBC peacock logos (notwithstanding the proverbial idiot in a hurry): with the former containing the addition of a crest, seven colours instead of six (pink) and the head turned left as opposed to right. This last point deserves a comment, because in earlier iterations of the NBC peacock the head faced left too, but was reoriented right during a revision by the design firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, who noted that left was “the wrong way for the [Western] reader’s eye” (cited in Ritter 2014). Others have noted how this switch also reoriented the peacock from the past to the future. Might we not say then that in the Chinese context the bird’s left look both adjusts itself to the local (right to left) reading direction (at least traditionally) and, temporally speaking, helps recast Anna Greenspan’s argument (in Chap. 4) that Chinese modernity appears to be moving “Forward to the Past” (2014, p. 2). Whatever the case, the manifestation of this peacock we turn to now is the advertising billboard that stands five metres tall on the intersection opposite the entrance to Bali Sunday mall (Fig. 6.5). The design features appear to be based on the shimmering train of the peacock, inheriting the biological principles and courtship rituals for which the train originally evolved. The biological principles concern the eyespots. But here the spots have been replaced by brands of the products on

Fig. 6.5  Logo of Bali Sunday: a multicolour peacock

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sale (and that one should be seen with) in the mall: such as the munched apple of Apple (in terms of its verticality being one of the most important brands and certainly one of the most seen in the hands of Chinese consumers) and the Starbucks mermaid (another common product held in the other hand of young people). A less popular theory regarding the peacock train maintains that the spots on the fan are not pseudo eyes but instead simulacra or symbols of food, for example, berries. This would also form a useful vector with many of the Bali Sunday peacocks, especially because the round spots of various manifestations were advertising the food or drinks available in the mall. Several months after the opening of the Bali Sunday mall, pictures taken from inside suggest that business was noticeably slow and the mall was often empty, even on weekends. The scenes of a mall teeming with people (including bearded foreigners) promised in the Bali Sunday promotional video had apparently not materialised (cf. Fig. 6.6).

Fig. 6.6  Busy mall in promotional video (top); empty mall in reality (bottom)

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This interpretation is supported because on 20 August, whilst X and Y were visiting a showroom on the outskirts of the city to explore the possibility of a second purchase (at “Noble Mountain”), they were alerted, by their Bali Sunday agent, to a protest being held outside the main entrance to the mall. The protestors were the owners of the businesses who were renting the shop spaces in the mall. The video circulating in the Bali Sunday homeowners WeChat group, which interrupted the tour of Noble Mountain, showed a live streaming of several tenants from the mall picketing in front of its main entrance (Fig. 6.7). On the banners reads: “无良商场 坑害商户 还商户血汗钱”, which translates roughly as “Unscrupulous shopping mall, entrapping merchant tenants, return the merchants the money earned by hard toil.” The delayed construction of the adjacent apartment complex had dire consequences for the foot flow through the mall, leading these commercial tenants to demand compensation—the apartment complex having been presumably touted as an instant customer base for the mall.

Fig. 6.7  Picket line at main entrance to mall

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Approximately two weeks after this protest, and timed to coincide with Chinese Valentine’s Day, a promotional drive was set up in response to the mall’s economic problems. This resulted in a commotion in the central atrium, which had been fitted with a stage, loud speakers, and an LED screen. The backdrop to the stage was a video wall playing children’s cartoons, while on the floor in front of the stage was a board game superimposed onto the ground afore a spectators viewing area (Fig. 6.8). Two female workers, wearing Southeast Asia themed dress, were stationed at the entrance to the board game area (right), with a sign-up desk and a “wheel of fortune.” Both sides of the board game were flanked by a row of cylinder aquariums containing various species of tropical fish. Other aspects of a tropical ocean scene included cardboard cut-outs of gigantic starfish and shellfish; fishing nets had been cast over the loud speakers. To be allowed to play these games, a receipt of purchase worth 70 RMB or more from any shop at the mall was needed. Upon presentation of the receipt to the hostesses, access was granted to the floor board game or the wheel of fortune. The floor board game worked as follows. The game space was composed of a sequence of squares, which players could advance around based on the scores derived from a throw of dice. As can be seen in Fig.  6.9 (left), squares either contained an arrow, meaning advance to next square, as conventional in these sorts of games, or a picture of a wrapped-up gift,

Fig. 6.8  Board game covers the floor of the mall (left), with the wheel of fortune (right)

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Fig. 6.9  Logic of the board game (left), with novelty gifts including a tropical fish (right)

which if landed on would lead to the player receiving one of various Bali Sunday branded novelty gifts (umbrellas, boxes of tissues, but also a live pet tropical fish; pictured in the right of Fig.  6.9). Some squares had a brand of the shops in the mall, for which a voucher would be given (see the squares “Roland” and “Seven half”—a BBQ/Hot Pot place). The brands on offer here contrasted with those originally advertised in the promotional video for the Bali Sunday mall. Instead of the luxury designer goods of Gucci, Givenchy and Coach these represented Chinese food chains and a music school (reputed to pile pressure on kids). Alternatively, p(l)ayers could convert their proof of a 70 RMB purchase into an opportunity to play the wheel of fortune. Figure  6.10 shows the advertisement situated next to the wheel, which has been coordinated with the theme of Chinese Valentine’s Day and includes instructions for how the game works. The wheel, once spun, might land on three options: (1) Novelty gift (umbrella, pack of tissues, pet tropical fish, etc.); (2) 20 RMB voucher to be spent in the mall (more on this later); or (3) 200 RMB mall voucher (presumably to be reclaimed at any shop in the mall). In our next sequence of framegrabs, we see a couple of friends with a small child arrive at the welcome desk with their receipt of purchase. After the hostess in Balinese dress stamps their receipt, they are invited to spin the wheel. On approach (left of Fig.  6.11) onlookers begin to egg this couple on to spin the wheel fast for a chance of winning the better prize (reason and playing casino games rarely go hand in hand). A crowd begins gathering, bringing a sense of suspense and excitement. She cranks the

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Fig. 6.10  Chinese Valentine’s Day instructions and the wheel of fortune

Fig. 6.11  Spinning the wheel (left); onlookers gather, player shushes them (right)

wheel into a startling spin. As it slows, an observer whispers something into the player’s ear—a good luck wish perhaps? But the player shushes him, as if unable to focus on anything else or not wanting to jinx her chances (right of Fig. 6.11). Success! The wheel lands on the number 2 prize, to a “wow” from the spectators. The p(l)ayers now turn eagerly to the hostess desk and await their prize, this wait almost occasioning a temper tantrum from their child who wants to spin again. As they move towards the desk, one of the

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contestants says enthusiastically “we can go drink coffee!” (我们去喝咖啡 women qu he kafe!). Their prize is indeed a voucher to be spent in the Bali Sunday mall Starbucks, which the hostess has taken from a huge stash of such vouchers under the desk. They ask “how much” and are told “20 RMB, just add 3 RMB for a small cup.” The lucky winners head off to Starbucks. This game, which we call the Starbucks wheel of fortune, went on all day.6 If Starbucks could be seen as profiting from students in Chap. 4, it certainly seems to be profiting from this drive at Bali Sunday too. As discussed, this Starbucks is one of over a hundred outlets that have popped up in the Yinzhou district, including the one at UNNC, which has become a flagship selling point (gaining proximate associations with reassuringly expensive Western educational excellence). Bearing in mind that the international goods supermarket inside the Bali Sunday mall was selling bottled Starbucks, customers in theory might buy such products to get the 70 RMB receipt, with this ticket allowing them in turn to enter the Starbucks wheel of fortune game, which allowed them to win a Starbucks voucher that they could go and spend (if they added more money) at the Starbucks outlet in the mall. We therefore perceive a virtual, and in all likelihood actualised, conveyor belt to be established in the mall. Not unlike what we observed in the showrooms, with the board game and wheel of fortune, the developers/managers/marketing team had set up a predetermined path that would allow p(l)ayers to increase their Starbucks consumption. We may therefore question whether such a promotional drive would benefit the tenants for whom it was originally deployed to assist. It would certainly benefit Starbucks, who had sponsored a portion of the winning vouchers. As on the university campus, guests would often leave the glass-­ fronted Starbucks carrying its branded wares with them, taking and sharing photos of their discounted creamy frappichinos webbed with sugary sauce lattices on their social networks. Leaving the Starbucks premises with their super sign cups in hand further served to transform their own bodies into temporary wandering advertisements for the semiocapitalist brand.

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Legendary Games: The七夕节日(Qixi) Festival and the Hunger Games Scramble After celebrating the Qixi Festival in their home mall, X and Y return to their apartment to find an electrician and brick layer still working away late into the night. Two more typically screened out actors that will not be going home early on Qixi, or on any day, for they ostensibly have no days off. They do take the occasional hour off, though, which is unpaid, this bricklayer being paid by the amount of bricks he lays. He says he is saving up to buy an apartment for his son. However, on his salary, this is going to be difficult, because the available space for new builds is becoming ever more precious during this city’s transition from second to new first tier. X has not yet moved into her apartment but receives daily canvas calls from agents, soliciting her, like other Bali Sunday homeowners, to sell her apartment space. 1,000,000 RMB could be earned on the spot if she said yes, this potential windfall making the purchase of more real estate as a speculative gamble, or future investment (投资 touzi) highly desirable. The two investment options that X began considering offer us a neat closing shot for this chapter, especially because they help illustrate a newly emerging breed of games that take everyday casino capitalism to higher economic strata. One option is to invest in apartments still standing near the city’s old Tianyi Square, because there is a rumour circulating that the government is going to bulldoze them within the next five years. By law, the developers must compensate the old evicted homeowners with one of the new apartments to be built in its stead. The trick is to buy one of the old run-down apartments with the hope of it being bulldozed. However the risk that counterweights the potential reward here is that planning permission might be delayed. The other option X is considering is therefore to invest in real estate that is further out from the city and further from being built, one space being out in Fenghua, which is better known as the strawberry field in between Ningbo and the suburb of Ninghai. As we write, a new underground metro line is being dug out to Fenghua, and the Ningbo Number One hospital has committed to moving its premises there in the future and to be fully operational by 2022. Developers are already building and selling real estate there, on the promise of what the relocation of the hospital will bring. X believes that doctors, paramedical staff and even patients will require housing, which can be rented at exclusive prices from the new homeowners.

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In a discussion with us, X says she has also overheard inside information about how to secure a good apartment on the day of sales in Fenghua. One agent has explained to a group of potential buyers how the bidding day will be organised and unfold. To enter the showroom, customers must first queue to purchase an entrance ticket, which costs 50,000 RMB. Once inside, the race is on to secure one of the more sought after properties— south facing, on a higher floor, and so on. Customers entering the showroom thus need to immediately race, literally, to the bidding queue (cf. Chap. 3). Indeed, X recalls the agent at this point telling one customer to “ask his wife not to wear high heels,” advising instead to “wear, like, sneakers, and she can run faster, who runs fast can go there and get a number, get a number, and have the opportunity to see the apartment.” Following the description of this Hunger Games (2012) style scramble, X sums up the ruthless subjectivity needed to play financial markets and play the high-stakes games perfectly, saying that is why “if you hesitate, if you are not faster than others, others may have this apartment, you can’t buy it, that’s it.”

Notes 1. Putting this material encounter into an encounter with philosophy for a moment, if for Deleuze and Guattari the anus was the first of the body’s organs to be privatised under a system of capitalism, the corresponding abject material of the shit it excretes can here be decoded as utterly anathema to the ideology of sanitised lifestyle consumerism and aspirational realism, and something increasingly voided from the subjective process of becoming-consumable-image. 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_would_rather_cry_in_a_BMW. 3. Over the years this line was also often reported as an illustrative detail in more than a few undergraduate essays and dissertations at UNNC, typically exploring moral panics and social media flashpoints, or used to illustrate a becoming-materialistic of Chinese culture. 4. Here we might recognise how the department stores, branded coffee shops and international supermarkets, as a naturalised annex to the modern domestic machines for living, operate as the “geometric locus of abundance” (Baudrillard 1998, p. 35; see also Marcuse 1991) and semiocapitalist signifiers of affluence. 5. It is also worth recalling in this context that “The peacock is another manifestation of the heavenly Phoenix on earth, it is one of the Twelve Symbols

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of Sovereignty. It has a hundred eyes on its tail which would activate fame, luck, promote public admiration and bring positive motives from other people. It is said that the magnificent peacock is able to relight the fires of an ailing relationship with the fiery energy of the animal. In decorative art, the peacock symbolizes dignity and beauty. In China, the bird was a symbol of the Ming Dynasty, representing divinity, rank, power, and beauty. The peacock with its tail of 100 eyes is also associated with the goddess Guan Yin. The peacock can feed on snakes and transmute evil into beauty, the goddess Guan Yin helps the suffering and thus transmutes evil into beauty. In this sense, the peacock resembles protection and holiness” (http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/Chinese_Customs/peacock.htm). 6. The fortune of Starbucks in China was already mentioned in the last chapter, when our visit to the transnational university campus environment saw a Starbucks outlet integrated to the teaching and learning space (learning/ shopping), inviting parallels between the university and a mall environment. The selfie-styled instagrammable drinks—ice-cream-like in venti-sized cups with creamy toppings drizzled with coloured syrups—have become a feature of university advertising materials, and global capitalism more generally. The staff in these Strabucks may remember your name as part of their affective service and personalisation campaign, but will not remember that you do not want to supersize your drink, add food or purchase other products.

References Arnold, B. (2018). Movie Investors in China Accused of ‘Booking Out Cinemas’ to Cheat Box Office Figures. Yahoo News. Retrieved from https://sg.news. yahoo.com/movie-investors-china-accused-cheating-box-of fice-figures-113611123.html. Baudrillard, J. (1998). The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage. Beller, J. (2006). The Cinematic Mode of Production. Lebanon: University Press of New England. Berry, C. (2014). China’s iGeneration: From Film Studies to Screen Studies. In M. D. Johnson et al. (Eds.), China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century (pp. vii–x). New  York and London: Bloomsbury. Braester, Y. (2007). Tracing the City’s Scars: Demolition and the Limits of the Documentary impulse in the New Urban Cinema. In Z.  Zhang (Ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (pp. 161–179). Durham: Duke University Press. Braester, Y. (2010). Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Braester, Y. (2012). From urban Films to urban Cinema: The Emergence of a Critical Concept. In Y.  Zhang (Ed.), A Companion to Chinese Cinema (pp. 346–358). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Brown, W. (2019). Self-Administering the Image Virus: Six Months of Selfies. In M.  Tinel-Temple, L.  Busetta, & M.  Monteiro (Eds.), From Self-Portrait to Selfie (pp. 231–253). London: Peter Lang. Clarke, D.  B. (2003). The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City. London: Routledge. Fincher, L. H. (2014). Left Over Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. London: Zed Books. Fleming, D. H. (2014a). Deleuze, the ‘(Si)neo-realist’ Break, and the Emergence of Chinese Any-now(here)-Spaces. Deleuze Studies, 8(4), 509–541. Fleming, D.  H. (2014b). The Creative Evolution and Crystallisation of the ‘Bastard line’: Drifting from the Rive Gauche into Suzhou River. Journal of Chinese Cinemas Special Issue: Deleuze & Chinese Cinemas, 8(2), 135–147. Fleming, D. H., & Indelicato, M. (2019). On Transnational Chinese Cinema(s), Hegemony, and Huallywood(s). Transnational Cinemas Journal Huallywood Special Issue, 10(3), 137–147. Flusser, V. (1983). Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books. Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist Interventions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Greenspan, A. (2014). Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gunning, T. (2016). An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator. In L.  Braudy & M.  Cohen (Eds.), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (8th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Khoo, O. (2019). Another Day at The Office: Huallywood Co-productions, Verticality, and the Project of a Comparative Film Studies. Transnational Screens, 10(3), 170–183. Li, D. L. (2016). Economy, Emotion and Ethics in Chinese Cinema: Globalization on Speed. London and New York: Routledge. Lu, S.  H. (2007). Tear Down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Popular Cinema and Avant-Garde Art. In Z.  Zhang (Ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (pp. 137–160). Durham: Duke University Press. Marcuse, H. (1991). One-Dimensional Man. London: Routledge. McCabe, C. (1974). Realism and the Cinema: Notes on some Brechtian Theses. Screen, 15(2), 7–27. McDonell, S. (2018). Movie Madness. Why Chinese Cinemas Are Empty But Full. Published on the BBC, 31 August 2018. Metz, C. (1977). Truckage and the Film (F. Meltzer, Trans.). Critical Inquiry, 3(4), 657–675.

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Pahl, K. and Pool, S. 2020. Hoping: The Literacies of the ‘Not Yet’. In K. Pahl and J. Rowsell et al. (Eds.), Living Literacies: Literacy for Social Change. Cambridge, MA, London, and England: MIT Press. PBS. (2001). Tale of the Peacock. Retrieved March 6, 2020, from https://www. pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/6/l_016_09.html. Ritter, M. (2014). Classic Campaign: The Peacock—The Colorful Evolution of NBC’s Iconic Logo. Advertising & Society Review, 15(3). https://doi. org/10.1353/asr.2014.0016. Ritzer, G. (1998). Introduction. In J. Baudrillard (Ed.), The Consumer Society. Sage. Strange, S. (2015). Casino Capitalism. Manchester: Manchester University Press; London: Sage. Zhang, Z. (2007). Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of ‘Transformation’ (Zhuanxing). In Z.  Zhang (Ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (pp. 1–46). Durham: Duke University Press.

Filmography Hua li shang ban zu /Design For Living. Directed by Johnnie To. 2015. Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang. 1927. The Hunger Games. Directed by Gary Ross. 2012. The Italian Job. Directed by F. Gary Gray. 2003. The Producers. Directed by Mel Brookes. 1967.

CHAPTER 7

Epilogue: Disneyfied Dreamwork Shi-nema— Tracing a New “Old” Path Through the Inauthentic “Traditional”

What is the reason for the strange acculturation phenomenon whereby advanced peoples seek out signs extrinsic to their own time or space, and increasingly remote relative to their own cultural system (a phenomenon which is the converse of ‘underdeveloped’ peoples’ attraction to the technological products and signs of the industrial world)? Baudrillard (2005, p. 79) Slightly Disneyfied Old Street: If you squint your eyes it is like being in China a hundred years ago. It’s near the train and bus stations so you can check it out as you leave or arrive in Ningbo. Tripadvisor Review (July 2018) Chinese culture tends to consider a building old if it resembles something that once stood in its place, even if it itself was only erected yesterday. The ‘real’ past, and the ‘copied’ present are thus inherently entangled. Anna Greenspan (2014, p. 127)

Nantang Old Street (南塘老街), a “local tourist spot” by design, provides us with one last simulacral synecdoche whose form and function fractally gesture towards Ningbo’s (and by extension China’s) larger urban shi-­ nematic condition. We thus wrap up our saunter through contemporary Ningbo by offering a final snap(chat) shot from one of China’s new “old towns.” These are increasingly popular “revival style” commercial zones

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whose “generic ‘traditional’ style” (Brown and O’Brien 2019, p. 8) expose the extent to which meaningful distinctions between the real and the imaginary, the traditional and the commercial, have collapsed in on themselves. Indeed, Nantang Old Street was completed in 2017, replete with shop façades and storefronts that simulate a traditional style of Ningbo building. For these reasons the space appears distantly reflective of the “Old Ningbo” street scene we discovered embedded within Wang’s Ningbo Historic Museum (cf. Chap. 4). This larger, outdoor, stone and concrete version perfectly reifies what a contemporary Huallywood-style1 Cinecitta would be, constituting a “city of living cinema where stage-sets and reality, tax-plans and scripts, the living and the living dead, mix and merge deliriously” (Virilio 2002, p. 448). Or, put differently, a modern shi-nematic machine for living that speaks of the contemporary urban planner’s desire to cook up a Chinese dream-space atmosphere that caters to new forms of “consumptive pleasure” and structures of perceiving entirely “befitting an economy of the spectacle” (Li 2016, p. 169). Fittingly, shortly after its completion in 2017, this new old or inauthentic traditional street space started to become a common final port of call for wining and dining academics after a UNNC research seminar or conference. Around 2018 the Ningbo “cultural site” also became a first port of call for UNNC’s new international and summer school students (added on to the usual trip around Wang’s museum), who are ferried there in order to (according to the UNNC website in 2019) get “a taste of Chinese culture.” An idea fitting for this project, we might add, if we consider that over and above Nantang Old Street’s cheap food and touristic souvenirs, the setting’s selfie-friendly traditional mise-en-scène (for smartphone consumption) make the whole arrangement a “visually edible” Chinese super sign (see e.g. Baudrillard 2005, p. 64). Of particular relevance to this final discussion, when we stopped there in 2017 with a visiting US scholar, an organic discussion broke out over her shock at a Taiwanese-style bubble tea drink stand whose “weird” colourful products appeared to boast a commercial tie-in with the still popular DreamWorks film Kung Fu Panda 3 (Alessandro Carloni and Jennifer Yuh Nelson 2016)—itself a form of inauthentic “Chinese” film that had proved divisive within China but can nonetheless serve as a salient point of cinematic comparison for our look here at what is often referred to as a “Disneyfied” style of architectural shi-nema.

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Hybrid Huallywood Cinema Our visiting academic, on seeing the bubble tea commercial cross-over started to discuss what Yiman Wang refers to as the strange “border crossings,” “interweaving transactions” and “mutual implications” associated with the growing convergence and interpenetration of what we can here call Hollywood and Huallywood filmmaking and marketing (see e.g. Wang 2009, p. 174). That is, the strategic blending of cultural “elements” that help (re-)market Chinese and US products overseas (ibid.). However, unknown to our visiting scholar at the time was how it was precisely on account of these perceived fusions, blends or what some saw as cultural appropriations that the longer run of Kung Fu Panda films (2008, 2011) had become politically contentious within China. This franchise in particular served, especially for left wing critics and industry protectionists, to highlight Hollywood’s strategic intensification and meshing of competing “media capitals” in order to crack open the lucrative Chinese film market (currently the second largest in the world after the US but projected to overtake it in the future). For others, it was perhaps that Hollywood studios made so much more profit than Huallywood animation studios with these films that was problematic, especially because they were trading in “Chinese elements” that originated outwith the geopolitical site of China. Indeed, Wang notes how the first two Kung Fu Panda films’ “return” to their so-called “originary” country saw domestic audiences responding with mixed feelings of “awe, wow and shame” (Wang 2009, pp. 171–4). The latter was perhaps made most clear by the bitter sentiments of the controversial academic and cultural commentator Kong Qingdong, who warned Chinese audiences that “Hollywood robs Chinese symbols and uses your own symbols to conquer you,” to “brainwash you and conquer your heart,” while also taking your Chinese money (quoted in Su 2016). If read in a similar war-like manner, the forthcoming Mulan (2020) reboot also betrays a comparable market ethos and ethico-aesthetics, and is likely to spawn a series of popular attractions in the Shanghai Disney Resort (which opened its gates in 2016). In a bid to appease such fears, Kung Fu Panda 3 became the first film in the series to be a hybrid joint venture co-production between US and Chinese financers, with DreamWorks Oriental being set up to oversee the production of two release versions of this third instalment in China—an English and Mandarin variety with different casts, scripts and facial animation for the CGI (computer-generated imagery) characters (Burkett

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2016). Being a film that is part Hollywood, part Huallywood this peculiar film stands out as a timely example of what Fleming elsewhere calls—after the economic monster “Chimerica” named by Ferguson and Schularick (2007) with fortuitous mythical chimeric undertones—contemporary “Chimerican” cinema (Fleming 2019). All this to say that, as DreamWorks and Disney animation make so clear, today signs of Chineseness no longer need be synonymous with a national identity or regional territory and can instead be recognised as “an ‘element,’ a ‘style,’ or a signifier that can be combined with other attractions to create an audio-visual ‘recipe’” that can help make films more palatable to Chinese audiences and political officials (Wang 2009, p. 173; see also Homewood 2018). Which is to say, “Chineseness” now circulates as an affective semiocapitalist sign or signifier that can be globally manufactured and consumed. By extension, with a view to similar shi-nematic principles, might we not also provoke by saying that Hollywood’s Kung Fu Panda films are today to Chinese cinema what Graumin’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood (described as a form of Exotic Revival Style architecture) is to contemporary Chinese “old town” architecture? Ideas that might signal that simulation has indeed taken “the central place in the emanation of the shared hallucination” that the Chinese now call their world (Berardi 2015, n.p.).

The New Old: Or, the Past Is a Foreign (and Exotic) Land Nantang Old Street is comparable in form and spirit (but not budget, popularity, turnover and scale) to the commercially refashioned and reimagined lilong (old singular laneway housing) of Shanghai’s Xintiandi (New World)—a new-but-retro-looking shopping and nightlife zone designed at the turn of the twentieth century (by a Hong Kong real estate company using an American architect). In contradistinction to Shanghai’s other futuristic architecture of the period, this “lifestyle centre” was designed to replicate or reconstitute a nineteenth-century shikumen (stone gate) building, with its marketing slogan being “Where yesterday meets tomorrow in Shanghai today.” While the street remains hugely popular nowadays, and generates huge footfall and turnover,2 not everyone is a fan. In an interview with Anna Greenspan, for example, the general manager of Tianzifang (a gentrified

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old town network of alleyways) Wu Meisen describes Xintiandi as a “purely commercial and fake” attempt to generate tourism and an “alien implant” into Shanghai’s existing screenscapes which constitutes “the biggest fake product in China” (Wu in Greenspan 2014, p. 125). For Greenspan, this setting, which was designed in a top-down manner, reveals a “Disneyfication effect” common to much contemporary city planning (p. 127). As a smaller budget and scale version of Xintiandi, Ningbo’s Nantang Old Street itself gets billed as a popular tourist destination, built conveniently near to the bullet train station (a fifteen-minute walk) along the banks of a river (past Ningbo Bay City; cf. Chap. 3). However, if Xintiandi is famous for selling and showcasing expensive high-end and glitzy brands and “super signs” (cf. Chaps. 3 and 6), Nantang is often characterised (as one 2019 visitor aptly puts it) as “a street with trinkets and food on a stick” that is somewhat like an “outdoor mall” (hktai on TripAdvisor 2019). Nantang’s and Xintiandi’s “traditional Chinese” architecture no doubt operates and signifies in a manner not too dissimilar to Kung Fu Panda’s “Chinese” mise-en-scène, ultimately surfacing as what Baudrillard would call “a mere cultural sign” of tradition that betrays “the order of having, or status, and not of the order of being” (2005, p. 83; emphasis in original). With their shared drive to inhabit an antique style, though, we can also perhaps detect a form of postsocialist guilty conscience at play in Nantang and Xintiandi, which we might link in turn to Baudrillard’s discussions of the psychological function of antiques (or repurposed older objects) in the postmodern West. These were often being sought to “carry humans back beyond time to their childhood—or perhaps even further still, back to a pre-birth reality where pure subjectivity was free to conflate itself metaphorically with its surroundings, so that these surroundings became simply the perfect discourse directed by human beings to themselves” (Baudrillard 2005, pp. 84–5). But if the functionality of Nantang’s outer architecture is here historically inauthentic, in Baudrillard’s Western postmodern sense of things, one cannot help but feel that the new-old form also simultaneously speaks to what Greenspan describes as “a complex form of looking forward” that is somehow simultaneously a “harking back” (2014, pp. 2–3), an idea that might catalyse one final detour to help propose some reasons why.

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The Old New: Or, the Future Is a Familiar (and Nearby) Land It would not be fair to our readers if, during this last saunter, we did not also briefly whisk you away to one of Ningbo’s “real” old streets, as we might have done for academics visiting UNNC with the luxury of a day or two’s leave. This would have occasioned a short train ride out to one of Ningbo’s counties called Ninghai 宁海, where we recall taking one visiting scholar to experience the ancient town of Qiantong (前童). Comfortingly far away from the likes of Nantang and Xintiandi, here one is hard pressed to find some Kung Fu Panda bubble tea. Yet a visit to Qiantong in 2016 suggested to us that a Huallywood-style Cinecitta might not be so far away after all. If a walk down the New Old Street of Nantang triggered the feelings of interweaving transactions in one visiting US scholar, it was a similar commercial tie-in that we recall stopped a different visiting academic in his tracks upon a walk through the 700-plus-year-old cobbled streets of Qiantong, for against the backdrop of Ming dynasty dwellings in one location, a large vending machine had been installed with flashing neon lights advertising its various sugary and caffeinated wares. This moved him to take the picture kindly provided below (Fig. 7.1), after which we discussed how the past and future are inherently entangled, the encroachment on public life of new technologies and machines for living, and the embodied actions and modes of consumption these intend and project. With hindsight, we can view this vending machine or alien implant as another “cultural sign,” though in this case of an alien future tradition in an historically repurposed setting. Qiantong’s new entrance gate, security guards, motorised buggy, QR codes and visiting centre would certainly be suggestive of a certain becoming-­inauthentic or becoming-consumable of Chinese history and tradition too, as would our local guide’s (a UNNC student) reaction to seeing her village being redesigned, monetised and regulated in this way. Purchasing tickets to visit her “own backyard” was out of the question for this local, so we recall this specific tour began by sneaking into Qiantong through an unguarded back alley, much to the bewilderment of our scholar visiting from the US. And if the lights, cables and wifi sensors of the previously mentioned vending machine is one way that China’s future infiltrates its past and begins to mutate it, this secret back alley can be seen as yet another, not least by introducing British and American academics from nearby Sino-foreign ventures into the Qiantong enclosure. Once

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Fig. 7.1  The vending machine (future tradition) in the Qiantong enclosure (historically repurposed setting)

inside, moreover, we recall on at least one occasion becoming the fodder for smartphone photos by a Chinese tourist, who appeared genuinely amused by the appearance of two aliens in the Ming dynasty setting with its ancestral halls and temples. This tourist’s amusement is perhaps not surprising when at least one reviewer of Qiantong on Tripadvisor has felt compelled to report “some real people still live there” (user MauMakan on TripAdvisor in  2019), while others include “grandmothers washing clothes” in their description of a setting that seems “very natural and real!” (user我的天114, 2015). Browsing such reviews reveals how the “real people” of Qiantong are often photographically consumed by the tourists who subsequently share their images online. Such archiving of the space and people reaches a climax in the documentary video “Ningbo China Qiantong Village During YuenXiaoJie” produced by the ex-pat English-language Ningbo Focus magazine (2013), as the presenters can be seen literally pointing (their

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fingers and cameras) at “the people” whose daily business momentarily becomes repurposed as an attention-worthy spectacle.3 Of course this is not the first time film crews have sought to harvest this setting for the consumptive pleasures of others. Qiantong was also the location for Chen Yifei’s final and indeed posthumously produced film, Li fa shi/The Music Box (理发师, 2006). This celebrated cinematic legacy, or historical cinematicity, is today being commercialised by the sounds and images that emanate from, and become projected into, at least one key location in the village (used in the film). This all suggests to us that Taiwanese-style bubble tea and Starbucks takeaway cups may not be so far away from the becoming-consumable of old Qiantong (and its heritage irrigation system). For while Nantang and Xintiandi are new old forms looking forwards but harking back (Greenspan 2014), we might also recognise Qiantong as an old new form looking back that enfolds it own harking forward.

Farewell to Ningbo: Or, a Picture Postcard Featuring a Picture of a Picture After describing our tele-interviews and recounting our memories and experiences at working at a form of science fiction Westworld, it is perhaps fitting that one of us had a farewell night out in a restaurant in the Nantang Old Street with colleagues. That night, the alleyways were dynamically animated with human traffic, around whom bellows of steam danced in the air courtesy of myriad cooking devices and vents. The dense atmosphere here became cinematically defracted and tainted by colourful light pollution emanating from the multiple signs, screens, adverts and lights peppering the consumable Cinecitta. Spontaneous iGeneration (see e.g. Berry 2014) filmmakers were everywhere using and shooting on their fancy decked out cinema-machines, taking and sharing images of sweet apples on sticks, bubble tea drinks, Starbucks cups, stinky dofu, afore the comforting consumable architecture and super signs of the traditional Chinese dreamwork. If not strict adverts for the food or consumable space itself, one sensed that the fate of these images was to become part of an on-going advert for the lifestyle of the subjects taking them. For we might read selfie culture and taking and sharing Instagram-like images like these as being symptomatic of the “becoming cinematic” of the self in modern semiocapitalist cultures (Brown 2019, p. 234)4—an idea that means that everyone making and taking these pictures in this simulacral Chinese

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screenscape is at once the agent, media, paparazzo, star (and fan?) of their own shi-nematic life. Of course, selfies that celebrate consumption in this way also invariably index the individual in question’s celebration of, and buying into, all that consumer culture has to offer (Iqani and Schroeder 2016). By such means the selfies we see being produced here on the new Old Street again help us to recognise a blurring of subject and object, private and public, living and shopping that bridge different scalar levels of our fractal diagram (between the subject level and the broader techno-cultural semiocapitalist desires and drives). Especially because these forms of image production, rather than being read as an act of “genuine self-expression,” illustrate how consumerist mediation moulds and in-forms individual agency (Iqani and Schroeder 2016).5 Recalling our arguments about the becoming-cinema of subjectivity and culture more broadly, the background actors can here be understood fashioning and self-branding themselves as aspiring Chinese “micro celebrities” (see e.g. Khamis 2017) who promote and project their own narrativised shi-nematic life (Iqani and Schroeder 2016). The transformation of the self into a sign or brand designed for the consumption by others here also confirms and self-validates the subject within a wider (cannibalistic capitalism?) cultural system (of objects and signs), which values the very features that the selfie in question attempts to arrange, assemble and promulgate—the citational  gestures and  poses, make-up, fashions, foods, super signs and signifiers of cosmopolitan mobility that define and affirm the ideology and values of the broader shi-nematic culture (see e.g. Brown 2019; Iqani and Schroeder 2016). We might end therefore with a consideration of a self-image captured in this highly consumable space during one of your author’s final nights out with his Westworld colleagues. To speak in the first person, for once, I recall consuming a range of pleasing Chinese style fast-food dishes  that night, alongside a range of pleasant “Hollywood wines” from France and Chile (see e.g. Baricco 2006, pp. 7–11). My abiding memory of the night comes not so much from the stimulating  food or conversations, however, but rather from a mistake I made by phatically admiring (out loud) an amusing painting of a dog that was hung on the wall near our dining table, for by so doing, I later found myself being presented with the canvas as a form of impromptu going-away gift. That is, my colleagues had asked the serving staff to add this picture to the dinner bill.6 Genuinely, I had not realised that the art on the walls, or the contents of the restaurant’s mise-en-scène, were also for sale!

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The hand-painted oil on canvas (which I later learned is a copy of another famous Chinese artist’s work) was then taken off the wall like an IKEA product and handed to me. As I bashfully thanked the collective purchasers I recall recognising afresh how everything we see in today’s shi-nematic arrangements are consumable in some way shape or form (if I could not have taken home the chair I sat in, I could still have taken a picture of it with my cinema-machine and had a search algorithm find an equivalent product for me to purchase and have delivered to my apartment via Taobao, which Jack Ma proudly advertises stocks ‘everything you want, and things you didn’t know you want’).7 Before exiting to the nearby Starbucks for a postprandial coffee, I was compelled to pose for a picture with my picture, taken with a friend’s smartphone, which was immediately shared via WeChat with everyone present, and others not so, as a form of consumable memory of my night, and indeed of our extended time in shi-nematic Ningbo.

Notes 1. For more on the notion of Huallywood, or an aspirational Chinese film industry, see Fleming and Indelicato (2019). 2. Anna Greenspan reports that in 2014 Xintiandi attracted more than 50,000 visitors a day, which adds up to around 170 million a year, which works out as more human traffic than Disneyland (2014, p. 113). 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N-k_B175d4. 4. Especially because such images (unconsciously?) reveal a mimicking of the aspirational “cinematic style of cool clothes, exotic locations” (Brown 2019, p. 248), and here we might add, exotic food and souvenirs styled according to the dictates of an attention hungry semiocapitalist society of hyperreal spectacles. 5. For Iqani and Schroeder, this form of self-portraiture, like no other today, transforms the self-image into a projected commodity or object—facilitated no doubt by the increasingly sophisticated editing options available at the swipe of a thumb. 6. The bill (with an added 500 RMB for the painting) was paid with the groups’ individual smartphones, which communicated with the waiter’s electronic device through QR code—a modern mode of exchange that forces us to rethink in turn the notion of capital and indeed money as forms of “image” that formulate the prolepsis and parallel to the cinema (see e.g. Wurzer in Beller 2006, p. 62; Berardi 2015, n.p.). 7. 没有你买不到的, 只有你想不到的.

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References Baricco, A. (2006). The Barbarians: An Essay on the Mutation of Culture (S. Sartarelli, Trans.). New York: Rizzoli Ex Libris. Baudrillard, J. (2005). The System of Objects (J. Benedict, Trans.). London: Verso. Beller, J. (2006). The Cinematic Mode of Production. Lebanon: University Press of New England. Berardi, F. B. (2015). Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso. Berry, C. (2014). China’s iGeneration: From Film Studies to Screen Studies. In M. D. Johnson et al. (Eds.), China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century (pp. vii–x). London: Bloomsbury. Brown, W. (2019). Self-Administering the Image Virus: Six months of Selfies. In Tinel-Temple, M, Busetta, L and Monteiro, M Eds. From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Representing the Self in the Moving Image (pp. 231–253). Oxford, New York: Peter Lang. Brown, M. S., & O’Brien, D. (2019). Defining the Right Path: Aligning Islam with Chinese Socialist Core Values at Ningbo’s Moon Lake Mosque. Asian Ethnicity. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2019.1636637. Burkett, L. (2016, January 26). Kung Fu Panda 3: A Litmus Test for China-­ Hollywood Joint Ventures. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https:// blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/01/26/kung-fu-panda-3-a-litmus-testfor-china-hollywood-joint-ventures/. Ferguson, N., & Schularick, M. (2007). Chimerica and the Global Asset Market Boom. International Finance, 10(3), 215–239. Fleming, D. H. (2019). Third-Culture Huàllywood: Or, ‘Chimerica’ the Cinematic Return. Transnational Cinemas Journal: Huallywood Special Issue, 10(3), 184–200. Fleming, D. H., & Indelicato, M. (2019). On Transnational Chinese Cinema(s), Hegemony, and Huallywood(s). Transnational Cinemas Journal Huallywood Special Issue, 10(3), 137–147. Greenspan, A. (2014). Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Homewood, C. (2018). ‘Directed by Hollywood, Edited by China?’: Chinese Soft Power, Geo-imaginaries, and Neo-Orientalism(s) in Recent U.S. Blockbusters. In R. A. Saunders & V. Strukov (Eds.), Popular Geopolitics: Plotting an Evolving Interdiscipline (pp. 174–196). London and New York: Routledge. Iqani, M., & Schroeder, J. (2016). #Selfie: Digital Self-Portraits as Commodity Form and Consumption Practice. Consumption Markets and Culture, 19(5), 1–11. Khamis, S. (2017). Self-Branding, ‘Micro-Celebrity’ and the Rise of Social Media Influencers. Celebrity Studies, 8(2), 191–208. Li, D. L. (2016). Economy, Emotion and Ethics in Chinese Cinema: Globalization on Speed. London and New York: Routledge.

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Su, W. (2016). China’s Encounter with Global Hollywood: Cultural Policy and the Film Industry 1994–2013. Video of Full Lecture with Presentation Slides Edited into Video. East Asia Program, Cornell University. Virilio, P. (2002). The Overexposed City. In G. Bridge & S. Watson (Eds.), The Blackwell City Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Wang, Y. (2009). Made in China, Sold in the United States, and Vice Versa— Transnational ‘Chinese’ Cinema between Media Capitals. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 3(2), 163–176.

Filmography Kung Fu Panda. Directed by Mark Osbourne and John Stevenson. 2008. Kung Fu Panda 2. Directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson. 2011. Kung Fu Panda 3. Alessandro Carloni and Jennifer Yuh Nelson. 2016. Li fa shi/The Music Box. Directed by Chen Yifei. 2006. Mulan. Directed by Niki Caro. 2020.

Index

A Abbas, Ackbar, 109 Absolute capitalism, 4 Acropolis of Athens, 9, 102 Adorno, T. W., 33 Agamben, Giorgio, 195 Agencement, 111 Anna Greenspan, A., 109 Any-now(here)-spaces, 22, 143 Any-space-whatever, 143 Apparatuses of capture, 3 Architecture, 9 Arnold, B., 189 Aspirational realism, 64 Augé, M., 143 Avant-garde, 8 B Badiou, Alain, 8 Bali Holiday, 186 Bali Sunday, 185 Baudrillard, J., ix, 4 Bazin, A, 36

Beckman, K., 8 Becoming-cinema, 8, 190 Becoming-cinematic, 3 Becoming-image, vii, 35 Becoming-light, 190 Beijing Olympics, 1, 37 Beijing Summer Olympics, 109 Beller, J., 4 Benjamin, W., 9 Bennett, J., 111 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 103 Berry, C., 64 Berthrong, J., 43 Bourdieu, Pierre, 47 Boustead Holdings Sdn Bhd, 152 Braester, Y., 37 Braudy, J-L., 7 Brown, M. S., 17 Brown, W., 8 Brynner, Yul, 141 Bryx, A., 45 Buchanan, I., 111 Buddhist, 44 Burkett, L., 221

© The Author(s) 2020 D. H. Fleming, S. Harrison, Chinese Urban Shi-nema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3

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INDEX

C Cahiers du Cinema, 65 Capitalism’s Second Coming, 1 Casino Capitalism, 22 Cave, 7 Chalmers, D., 54 Champagne, J., 158 Chaudhuri, S., 46 Chen, 66 Chen Kaige, 21 Chinese cities, 14 Chinese Dream, 66 Chrichton, Michael, 21 Cinecitta, 220 Cinema of attractions, 188 Cinema-machine, 8 Cinema 1, 21 Cinematic apparatus, 7 Cinematicity, 2 Cinema 2, 21 Clark, A., 54 Clarke, D. B., 36, 68 Confucian, 43 Consumer society, 12 Control, 8 Control society, 148 Crichton, Michael, 140 Cultural Revolution, 142 The Culture of Cities, 110 D Dark zeitgeist, 4 de Certeau, Michel, 51 Debord, G., 3 DeLanda, M., 1 Deleuze, G., 3 Di Paolo, E. A., 53 Disciplinary societies, 148 Disney, 23 Disneyfied, 23 Dividual, 148

Doel, M. A., 36 Dolly zoom, 10 DreamWorks, 23 DreamWorks Oriental, 221 Durham, William H., 50 Durkheim, Emile, 50 E E-approaches, 3 Ecological, 9 Eisenstein, S. M., 9, 102 Elsaesser, T., 7 Entangled, 12 Entrepreneurial cities, 2 Exo-Darwinian, 12 F Fan, V., 35 Fey, 40 Ficto-critical, 17 Film Theory, 7, 10 Fincher, L. H., 47 Fisher, M., 21 Fleming, D. H., 22 Foglia, Lucia, 54 Foucault, Michel, 2, 108 4E, 53 4E psychogeographic, 3 Fractal, 11 Fractalactic, 45 Frampton, D., 36, 64 Frampton, Hollis, 8 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, 4 G Gabrieli, T., 47 Gallagher, S., 53, 55 Geiger, J., 36 Genosko, G., 4

 INDEX 

Girls’ Generation, 169 Goodman, N., 112 Gow, I., 156 Graumin’s Chinese Theatre, 222 Greenspan, A., 222 G20, 190 Guattari, F., 3 Gunning, T., 188 H Harvey, D., 37 Herzog, Werner, 7 Heterotopic, 108 Hillier, J., 41 Hitchcock, Alfred, 10 Hollywood, 102 Homo economics, 12 Homo economicus, 2 Horkheimer, M., 33 How Buildings Mean, 112 Huallywood, 22, 188 Hui, 46 I If You Are the One, 22, 187 iGeneration, 193 Impatient architecture, 110 Italian Job, 197 J Jaffee, V., 21, 65 Jia Zhangke, 20 Jullien, François, 2 K Khoo, O., 64 kinematiKs, 8 KNT, 32

Kongqi, 40 Kong Qingdong, 221 L Lang, Fritz, 195 Las Vegas, 102 Le Corbusier, 2 Levi, P., 8 Li, D. L., 1, 220 liloLg, 222 Lin, X., 8, 21, 65 Littau, K., 36 M Ma, J., 8 McCabe, C., 188 Macau, 189 McDonell, S., 188 Machinic phylum, 9 MacKenzie, I., 113 Mahjong, 127 Main melody, 21, 64–65 Malafouris, L., 54 Mao Zedong, 32 Marcuse, H., 4 Marx, 4 Mass murder, 4 Massumi, Brian, 111 Mauss, M.., 32 Merleau-Ponty, M., 55 Metz, C., 188 Metzinger, Thomas, 55 Meyers, Nancy, 66 Monopoly, 22, 187 Montage and Architecture, 102 Mou, 40 Movement-image, 113 Mumford, L., 108 Murder suicide, 4

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INDEX

N Nantang, 23 National Broadcasting Company (NBC), 206 Nelson, Richard, 154 Ningbo Historic Museum, 220 Ningbo Tengtou Pavilion, 111 Non-places, 22, 143 Nottingham University Business School (NUBS), 153 O O’Brien, D., 17 O’Donnell, B., 17 O’Sullivan, S., 101 P Pisters, P., 54 Plato, 7 Polan, Dana B., 32 Porter, R., 113 Posthuman, 50 Postmodernist, 14 Postsocialist, 2, 14 The Price is Right, 22, 187 Pritzker Prize, 112 Proto-cinematic, 9 Psychogeography, 3 R Rahul Mehrortra, 110 Ranciere, J., 7 Readings, B., 148 Realist, 11 Red Army, 32 Reynolds, B., 45 Reynolds, D., 9, 54 Ritter, M., 206 Ritzer, G., 186

Rowlands, M., 53 Reality TV Shows, 22 S St Peter’s Baldachin, 103 Screens, 5 Self-murder, 4 Semiocapitalism, 4 Serres, M., 12 Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade, 109 Shanghai World Expo, 1 Shattock, Michael, 156 Shaviro, S., 55 Shi, 2 Shikumen, 222 Shi-nema, 2 Siegel, Don, 21 Simulacral, 23 Sino-foreign university, 16 Smartphones, 5, 55 Snakes and Ladders, 22, 187 Social ontology, 11 Sovereign societies, 148 Special City, 5 Starbucks, 21, 55 State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), 106 Su, W., 221 Suicide, 4 T Taoist, 43 Three Gorges Dam, 107 Thrift, N., x Tianzifang, 222 Time-image, 113 To, Johnnie, 66 Tolstoy, L., 101 Tomasula, S., 50

 INDEX 

Tonglin Lu, 46 Tony Leung Chiu-wai, viii Tucker, M. E., 43 U University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), vii, 16 Urban Generation, 143 V Vertigo, 10 Vertigo effect, 10 Virilio, P., 33, 102, 220 The Voice of China, 22, 187 W Wang, Y., 221 Wang Shu, 20 Wang Ziyi, 68 Wanli Education Group (WEG), 152 What Is Philosophy, 112 Wheel of Fortune, 22, 187

WHO, 5 Williams, K., 36 Wilson, Robert A., 54 Winter, Sidney, 154 Wise, J. M., 111 World War II, 113 Wu Meisen, 223 X Xintiandi, 222 Xuanxiang, 40 Y Yueting Lang, 68 Yu-Ming Liu, 41 Z Zen, 36 Zhang Yuan, 21 Zhang, Z., 21, 65 Zhou, 188 Zhu xuanlü, 21, 64, 100

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