Love Stories in China: The Politics of Intimacy in the Twenty-First Century 9780367224691, 9780429275029

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Love Stories in China

This book explores how political, economic, social, cultural and technological forces are (re)shaping the meanings of love and intimacy in China’s public culture. It focuses on a range of cultural and media forms including literature, film, television, music and new media, examines new cultural practices such as online activism, virtual intimacy and relationship counselling, and discusses how far love and romance have come to assume new shapes and forms in the twenty-­ first century. Love Stories in China offers deep insights into how the huge transformation in China over the last four decades has impacted the micro lives of ordinary Chinese people. Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Communication at University of Technology Sydney Ling Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese at Xiamen University, China

Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia Series Editor: Stephanie Hemelryk Donald Editorial Board: Gregory N. Evon, University of New South Wales Devleena Ghosh, University of Technology, Sydney Peter Horsfield, RMIT University, Melbourne Chris Hudson, RMIT University, Melbourne Michael Keane, Curtin University Tania Lewis, RMIT University, Melbourne Vera Mackie, University of Wollongong Kama Maclean, University of New South Wales Laikwan Pang, Chinese University of Hong Kong Gary Rawnsley, Aberystwyth University Ming-­yeh Rawnsley, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Jo Tacchi, Lancaster University Adrian Vickers, University of Sydney Jing Wang, MIT Ying Zhu, City University of New York The aim of this series is to publish original, high-­quality work by both new and established scholars in the West and the East, on all aspects of media, culture and social change in Asia. 63 The Early Transnational Chinese Film Industry, 1897–1937 Yongchun Fu 64 Urban Culture in Pre-­war Japan Adam Thorin Croft 65 Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia Edited by Markus Schleiter and Erik de Maaker 66 Love Stories in China The Politics of Intimacy in the Twenty-­First Century Edited by Wanning Sun and Ling Yang For a full list of available titles please visit: www.routledge.com/Media-­Cultureand-­Social-Change-­in-Asia-­Series/book-­series/SE0797

Love Stories in China

The Politics of Intimacy in the Twenty-­First Century

Edited by Wanning Sun and Ling Yang

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Wanning Sun and Ling Yang; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of Wanning Sun and Ling Yang to be identified as the authors of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-22469-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-27502-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgements

  1 Introduction: love stories in contemporary China

viii ix xi 1

W anning  S un and L ing  Y ang

Part I

Marriage in trouble

23

  2 Is it better to cry in a BMW or laugh on a bicycle? Television shows, marriage and the production of class in urban China

25

R ob e rta Z avor e tti

  3 Successology for women: relationship experts and sociobiological discourses

43

H aiping  L iu

  4 Holding virtual hands: an ethical practice against male infidelity in digital China

62

Y i  Z hou

Part II

Rural–urban inequality

81

  5 ‘Phoenix men’: changing representations of urban–rural marriages in contemporary China

83

G uo q ing  Z h e ng

vi   Contents   6 Negotiating class and the rural–urban divide in urban homes: configuring the maid in literature and popular culture

97

Y anwen  L i

  7 Wounded masculinities: the subaltern between online longings and offline realities

113

T ingting  L iu

Part III

Gender, race and class

131

  8 Women in rural romantic love: gender politics in television dramas

133

H uike  W en

  9 Tiny Times, persistent love: gender, class and relationships in post-­1980s bestsellers

151

L ing  Y ang

10 The ‘social factory’ of China’s male ‘virtual lovers’

168

C hris  K .   K .   T an and Z hiw e i  X u

11 International romance: changing discourses of Chinese–foreign intimacy in the decades of economic reforms

185

P an  W ang

Part IV

Queer voices

203

12 The emerging ‘national husband’: queer female fantasy in popular culture

205

J ami e J .   Z hao

13 ‘Revolution plus love?’ Online fandom of the television drama series The Disguiser X i q ing  Z h e ng

226

Contents   vii 14 A love story: Li Yuchun’s fans and contemporary Chinese singledom

244

M aud  L avin



Index

258

Figures

  3.1 Love storm workshop, 17 January 2016   7.1 A post with picture on a Baidu Tieba forum themed ‘Qingxi Town in Dongguan’   7.2 A picture promoting the game ‘Me Being an Emperor in the Qing Dynasty’ 11.1 ‘Dangerous love’ poster 12.1 A screen capture from Go, Princess, Go!, showing the princess flirting with a maidservant before (s)he accepts the female body 12.2 A screen capture of the band Acrush performing at the concert ‘Husband Exhibition’ in March 2017 12.3 A screen capture of Acrush’s fan-­made Weibo page in June 2017

44 121 123 197 216 220 221

Contributors

Maud Lavin is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies and Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yanwen Li is Associate Professor of Chinese at the International Communication School of Tianjin Foreign Studies University. Haiping Liu is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies and Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Tingting Liu is an Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Jinan University, Guangzhou, China and an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Chris K. K. Tan is an Associate Professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Nanjing University in the People’s Republic of China. Pan Wang is Senior Lecturer in Chinese and Asian Studies, University of New South Wales, Australia. Huike Wen is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Williamette University, Salem, Oregon. Zhiwei Xu is a PhD candidate in the School of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China. Ling Yang is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Xiamen University, People’s Republic of China. Roberta Zavoretti is a social anthropologist. She teaches social anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. Jamie J. Zhao is a Lecturer in Communication Studies in the School of Film and Television Arts at Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University.

x   Contributors Guoqing Zheng is Associate Professor of Chinese at Xiamen University, People’s Republic of China. Xiqing Zheng is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China. Yi Zhou is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, United States of America.

Acknowledgements

This book project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, for a project entitled ‘Inequality in Love: Romance and Intimacy among China’s Young Rural Migrant Workers’, 2015–2017 (DP 150103544). Wanning Sun would like to thank Mary Spongberg, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, for her feedback on the project at the stage of grant preparation. Wanning Sun is also indebted to colleagues Michael Prince, Claire Moore, Karen Hill and Alan McKee at the research office of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney for their ongoing support. The chapters in this volume were extensively discussed at a workshop held in November 2017 at Xiamen University, China. We would like to thank Professor Zhu Jing, Dean of Xiamen University’s College of Humanities, and Vice-­Dean Professor Li Xiaohong for their support. We also thank Xiamen University’s student volunteers, Jiang Shuchen and Xu Junyan, for assisting us throughout the workshop. A number of scholars attended the workshop and served as discussants for earlier versions of the chapters in this volume. To Eric Florence, Gina Marchetti, Jing Wu and Geng Song: thank you for your excellent comments and your collegiality. Finally, preparation of the manuscript would not have been so plain sailing without the efficient and thorough editorial assistance of Suzanne Eggins. Wanning Sun and Ling Yang

1 Introduction Love stories in contemporary China Wanning Sun and Ling Yang

Since the 1980s, China has been undergoing modernization at an unparalleled pace, resulting in dramatic social, cultural and economic impacts in the daily lives of Chinese people. This volume brings together scholars who are interested in the ways in which the multitude of political, economic, social, cultural and technological forces currently at work in China are (re)shaping the meanings of love and intimacy in public culture. The contributors to this volume focus on a range of cultural and media forms such as literature, film, television, music and new media. They also examine new cultural practices such as online activism, virtual intimacy and relationship counselling. By focusing on love and intimacy, this book seeks to shed light on texts and textual practices in China’s media, literature and popular culture that are not easily accessible to those outside the Mainland but which express meanings that have profound significance in the lives of individuals. Love and romance have been the subject of many previous academic studies in various cultures and societies, including in China. Romantic love, as Jankowiak defines it, refers to ‘any intense attraction involving the idealization of the other within an erotic context’ (1995a, p. 4). The notion of romantic love is believed to be ‘near universal’ and is by no means just a ‘modern subjective experience’ (Jankowiak 2011). Research approaches to the study of love range from the social and cultural to the biochemical, psychophysical and neurological. Despite differences in research methods and purposes, there seems to be consensus on a number of points. First, it is difficult to separate sex from romantic love, even though the latter refers specifically to the process of emotional bonding. Second, the emotional experiences associated with romantic love are highly valued and the romantic couple is cherished as the ideal social relationship in almost all societies, even though in some contexts such relationships have to be conducted in secrecy (Jankowiak 2011). Third, as with other types of emotional experience, romantic love in capitalist societies is linked to consumption habits and is therefore increasingly subject to exploitation by the market. In both common sense and academic usage, the word ‘love’ is applied to a broad spectrum of relationships, ranging from conjugal and familial relations to friendship. ‘Love’ is also a concept that can be explored from a variety of approaches—sociological, religious, philosophical and psychological. In this

2   Wanning Sun and Ling Yang volume, the term ‘love’ is deployed in a relatively specific sense to focus on relationships between two adult individuals that have a potentially romantic, intimate, sexual and/or marital dimension. Chinese cultures and societies, as elsewhere, hold a rich repository of moving and poignant love stories. From the folk legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai— who turn into butterflies to continue their forbidden love—to the ill-­fated romance between kindred spirits Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu in the Dream of the Red Chamber, powerful love stories have always enthralled, overwhelmed and inspired Chinese people and transported them to a different world. However, until the beginning of the twentieth century, in China notions of love and romance and ideas about what constituted intimacy were shaped to varying degrees by an entire array of cultural forces including Confucianism and other religious and philosophical traditions. These traditions determined that the individual’s practices in matters of intimacy and love were shaped primarily by age-­ old cultural values including patriarchy, filial piety and a sense of duty to the family. Similarly, understandings about what love meant and what constituted appropriate forms and levels of intimacy were dictated by culture-­specific feelings and emotions including guilt and shame. Since the beginning of the new millennium, China has witnessed both diversification in the modes of expression and permutation in the meanings of love and romance in literature, film, television and music, across a wide range of digital spaces and platforms. However, despite profound changes, there is little understanding of how the myriad political, economic, social and cultural forces shape the production of contemporary love stories. Nor are we clear whether the expressions and practices of intimacy have come to assume novel shapes and forms in the new millennium, amidst the tightening of authoritarian control, the deepening of socioeconomic inequality and the proliferation of social identities. Addressing these questions has become a matter of urgent intellectual concern for at least three reasons. First, answering these questions is integral to the process of producing knowledge about ‘deep China’. As Arthur Kleinman and colleagues eloquently argue: ‘If government policies, social institutions, and market activities constitute the surface of a changing China, the perceptual, emotional, and moral experience of Chinese, hundreds of millions of them, make up what we refer to as deep China’ (Kleinman et al. 2011, p. 3). Knowledge of deep China is not possible without asking how the perceptual, emotional and moral experiences of Chinese people are shaped by government policies, social institutions and market activities. In other words, research into textual expressions of love, romance and intimacy allows us to explore the interface between the personal and individual on the one hand, and state power and social forces on the other. In this way we are able to assess the extent to which the state continues to exercise ideological control and attempts to regulate the moral behaviour of its citizens. Textual research enables us to identify key state-­authorized narratives and politically expedient ways of telling love stories in official discourses, as well as understanding the acceptable range of themes and discourses of romantic love in mainstream popular cultural production.

Introduction   3 Second, the study of romantic love provides insight into an important and overlooked dimension of socioeconomic inequality. As practices of love and romance are key moments of socioeconomic exchange, they are often burdened with the task of mediating and negotiating structural and material inequality (Clarke 2011; Illouz 1997; Watson 1991). For this reason, an examination of the ways in which love and intimacy are produced in cultural texts and practised in everyday life promises to furnish valuable insights into the cultural politics of inequality along a range of social markers such as gender, class, sexuality and the rural–urban divide. Third, and equally importantly, studying social change through the prism of intimacy opens up a new space in which to explore the intricate interplay between state, market, tradition and patriarchy. In this critical space, we can set about identifying emergent new emotions and affects (e.g. anxiety, lack of emotional security, cynicism) that underscore contemporary narratives of love, romance and intimacy. We can also delineate the dominant, emerging and residual moral grammar according to which romantic love is defined and narrated in the millennial decades of economic reform and the market economy.

Privatization and intimate life in China The most logical place to start this critical project is to ask how social change has impacted the remaking of the Chinese individual. If the three decades of socialism in Mao’s era from the 1950s to the 1970s were marked by a high level of collectivism, since the 1980s the post-­Mao Party-­state is characterized by the launching of a series of privatization processes in the public sector. These include the rollback of the Chinese state as provider of public health, education, housing and other goods and services. Equally importantly, the changes also include the state, to a considerable extent, retreating from its role as mediator in personal, familial, neighbourly and civic relationships. For instance, state-­ authorized figures and institutions that used to embody the moral legitimacy and leadership of the paternal Party-­state have largely disappeared. In urban China, this process has effectively turned the individual from an institutionalized ‘workplace person’ into a ‘social person’ (Farquhar and Zhang 2012). It has also largely dissolved the mechanisms of workplace socialization, ideological ‘thought work’ and ethical guidance typically associated with socialist forms of moral education. In these changing times, individuals have found themselves unshackled from the social norms and commitments associated with socialism, with a hitherto unavailable space of personal freedom in which to experiment with different modes of self-­formation. The Maoist state determined the parameters of a ‘proper’ life, leaving little room or need for individuals to make their own decisions (Farquhar and Zhang 2012), including decisions about whom to date and how to love. Since the economic reforms, the ethos of individual choice—the basic tenant of neoliberal ideology—has secured a foothold in regulating the realm of the private and the personal. As Rofel (2007) has argued, and as the

4   Wanning Sun and Ling Yang chapters in this book will show, the cultural formations of post-­socialist China are largely anchored in the production of the ‘desiring’, self-­governing and reflexive subject. Privatization has also had a profound impact on how intimacy is perceived and practised. Once defined through what Featherstone (1995, p.  229) calls ‘face-­to-face relationships amongst kin and locals within a bounded known world’, intimacy, as Chinese individuals knew it, emerged out of a range of interpersonal bonds such as those with friends, colleagues, neighbours, partners/ spouses and family members. Nowadays, however, interpersonal relationships are increasingly considered more a source of economic benefit than of emotional intimacy. As a result, the relationship of the couple has become the main source of intimacy for individuals in post-­Mao China (Sun and Lei 2017). Individualization is conceptualized by classical sociologists as the social surfacing of the individual as a unique intersection of social roles, responsibilities and functions. It is also understood as the cultural accentuation of the individual as an independent, separated and original being (Sassatelli 2011). In their discussion of second or late modernity, Beck (1992) and Giddens (1991) both argue that since industrialization in the twentieth century, individual behaviour has become less bound by traditional norms and class-­based collective identity. One’s life is increasingly a reflexive self-­programmed project. Central to the conceptualization of the individual is the notion of choice, the taken-­for-granted belief that individuals are free to make their own choices in pursuing their desires and goals in life. As choice has become the ultimate source of value, the notion of individual choice has become a normative framework, within which experts produce and deploy knowledge to evaluate consumer practices and their moral worth. What is often missing from this expert knowledge is the fact that choice-­making is limited by deeply rooted and multilayered ordinary practices, social relations, structural hierarchies and institutions. Furthermore, as the ongoing debate in China around the fraught phenomenon of extra-­marital affairs testifies, the notion of choice is often in conflict with notions of responsibility and obligation. While China’s embrace of privatization and modernization means that, when it comes to love and intimacy, we need to consider the impact of individualization, it is equally important to ask how individualization works in authoritarian states such as China. Both informed by and in dialogue with China scholars, Beck and Grande (2010) point out that individualization, which is central to the language of justice and law in Europe, is enforced in China by a strong one-­ Party-state that at the same time does not tolerate individualism. Echoing Beck and Grande, Yan (2010, p.  509), believes that the Party-­state engages in the project of managed individualization as a ‘means to the end of modernization’. It is, therefore, an individualization that nevertheless does not lead to individualism (Yan 2009).

Introduction   5

Neoliberal logic under socialist rule It is widely understood that economic reforms since the late 1970s have seen China dramatically transformed from a socialist to a largely capitalist economy. However, it is equally clear that the everyday lives of Chinese people continue to be shaped by an ambiguous and paradoxical process that has witnessed the progressive application of neoliberal strategies on the one hand, and continuing and intensified (re)articulation of China’s socialist legacies on the other (Zhao 2008). To be sure, China has never officially and openly pronounced itself a neoliberal state. Indeed, some may find it odd that neoliberalism is used to describe a country such as China, where the government still holds a considerable portion of the country’s fixed assets and where strong institutions, rule of law, transparent markets and democracy—the hallmark of neoliberal structure—are largely missing. Having said that, it can be argued that many of China’s economic, social and political strategies of governing are indeed neoliberal. It is for this reason that some scholars believe that we are now witnessing ‘China’s selective embrace of neoliberal logic as a strategic calculation for creating self-­governing subjects who will enrich and strengthen Chinese authoritarian rule’ (Ong and Zhang 2008, p. 10). The myriad impacts of this paradoxical process have been explored from a number of angles (Anagnost 2008; Hoffman 2010; Rofel 2007; Zhang and Ong 2008). It has also been observed that a number of differences between China and liberal-­democratic societies in the West remain firmly in place. In addition, although the state has shifted the burden of providing public housing, education, health and essential services from itself to the market and individuals, the realm of cultural production, especially the Chinese media, continues to operate according to the principle of both the ‘Party line’ and the ‘bottom line’ (Zhao 1998). If anything, in the regime of Xi Jinping in the new millennium, the Party intends to maintain a keener interest in setting, maintaining and policing the boundary of what is permissible in the realm of cultural production, particularly in the area of entertainment media and popular culture (Bai and Song 2015). We are therefore confronted with two central questions. First, has China’s selective embrace of neoliberal socioeconomic policies and practices led to some kind of neoliberal cultural politics? Second, if China is situated in the constellations of socialist rule, neoliberal logic and self-­governing practices, how do these constellations shape the ways in which love and intimacy are understood and practised?

Revolution in the intimate sphere There is a growing body of research on the topics of love, sexuality, family and marriage in reform-­era China. This literature includes anthropological and sociological works on kinship, family and marriage in Chinese society (Brandtstädter and Santos 2009; Davis and Friedman 2014; Farquhar 2002; Farrer 2002; Jeffreys 2006; Pan 2006, 2017; Pan and Huang 2013; Rofel 2007; Santos and Harrell 2017; Wang 2015; Yan 2009; Zhang 2011). Harriet Evans’ (1997) Women and Sexuality

6   Wanning Sun and Ling Yang in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 stands out as one of the few books that approaches gender and sexuality through the prism of state and market discourses. Also noteworthy is Farquhar’s (2002) book, which argues for the use of literature to enhance ethnographic endeavours; very few anthropological studies take a cultural studies approach and consider the role of media and popular culture in shaping romantic or intimate relationships. We know from this growing body of work that, for instance, educated urban Chinese people now conduct intimate relationships in the context of greatly reduced state oversight of sexual relationships. Sociologists point to the ‘deinstitutionalization’ of marriage and intimate life in the reform era (Davis and Friedman 2014). On the one hand, there has been a tendency to delink sex from reproduction and marriage. Sex for reproduction has in part given way to sex for pleasure (Pan 2006). On the other hand, sexual pleasure is no longer necessarily tied to romantic love (Zhang 2011). This process has afforded Chinese citizens more freedom to ‘script their lives’ than before (Davis and Friedman 2014, p. 3). New means of expressing and achieving sexual intimacy have emerged, which in turn pose challenges to the normative, traditional modes of sexuality. The ways in which these changes affect the intimate lives of young people in urban China have been carefully documented in anthropological literature. James Farrer’s (2014) ethnography in Shanghai uncovers a proliferation of ‘multiple sexual subcultures’ in large Chinese cities, which provide an anonymous social backdrop to urban life. In their fieldwork in Hohhot and Nanjing, Jankowiak and Li (2017) identified a shift from a culture of courting to a culture of dating. Young people in educated urban circles have come to view equality between couples as paramount in an ideal relationship, and the language of love, complete with an ‘emotionally involved model’, is contesting the language of duty, which favours a ‘dutiful spouse model’ (Jankowiak and Li 2017, p.  153). The notion of intimacy has to some extent replaced marriage as a worthy goal in relationships, and educated urban young people are increasingly aware of the need for ‘constant communication’ as a way to achieve and maintain intimacy in an ‘emotional terrain of increasing ambiguity, risk and fluidity in intimate relationships’ (Farrer 2014, p. 91). It is now widely understood that communication is especially important for couples due to the increased level of geographical mobility in contemporary China. While the field of Chinese queer studies has started to take shape (Bao 2018; Engebretsen 2014; Kam 2013; Kong 2010), anthropological work has confirmed an increased level of ‘affective individualism’ (Donner and Santos 2016) in navigating heterosexual marital relationships, especially in big cities. For instance, individuals in Shanghai are putting more emphasis on ‘personal choice and self-­fulfilment’ (Cai and Feng 2014, p. 114). Among educated young people in Shanghai, premarital sex has become increasingly acceptable, as long as commitment and intimacy are present in the relationship. These days, young people in the city have the option of marrying late (Cai and Feng 2014) or not marrying at all (Davis and Friedman 2014; Zhang and Sun 2014). Marriages between ­individuals from different provinces and regions are increasingly common due to

Introduction   7 increased geographical mobility (Xinhua 2005), as are inter-­racial and cross-­ border marriages (Wang 2015). Chinese citizens also have more opportunities to ‘enter and exit relationships’ and more variations in the models of relationships have become available to them (Farrer 2014, pp. 90–91). Increasingly, educated urban individuals in China have become caught up in in what Beck (1992) describes as ‘dis-­embedding and re-­embedding’ in the paradoxical process of ‘individualization’. That is, these educated urbanites are gradually being dis-­embedded from a traditional context in which marriage, sex and intimate relationships are practised, and re-­embedded in a modern one. As Giddens (1991, p. 16) points out, a key element of becoming modern is adopting a new understanding and practice of intimacy, and the quest for intimacy is at the heart of modern forms of established sexual relationships. Defined as relationships that are voluntary, personal, emotionally authentic and love- and care-­ based, intimacy has grown more desirable. Yet intimacy thus defined is even harder to achieve than before. On the one hand, individuals have become more ‘mobile, unsettled, and “open” ’ in their behaviour and feelings about sexuality and love, creating ‘unexplored territory to be charted’—territory that is fraught with ‘new dangers’ (Giddens 1991, pp.  12–13). On the other hand, along with the freedom to develop a new ‘life politics’ comes an increased level of anxiety, and a sense of risk in the private sphere of love and intimate relationships (Giddens 1991, p.  9). In their efforts to minimize risk and cope with the new anxieties and uncertainties thrown up by a more open and mobile life, growing numbers of Chinese middle-­class consumers are turning to professional advice in the form of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy (Yang 2015; Zhang 2014, 2015). They are also actively seeking advice from radio talk shows, reality shows on television and from experts who regularly deliver advice through subscription accounts on social media (Sun and Lei 2017). While these changes are clear evidence of the triumph of modernity over ­tradition, anthropologists caution against a clear-­cut and dichotomous approach to such a dualistic framework in making sense of individuals’ actions. Ethnographic data, for instance, suggests that on matters of love and marriage, women exercise often quite limited agency against larger social forces, including the material imperative of home ownership on the one hand, and the interpellation of the ‘ideal wife’ promoted by both the state and patriarchal culture on the other. Rather than becoming a new modern subject, women looking for Mr Right continue to engage in bargains and negotiations with structural forces, whether patriarchy, the state or materialist necessity (Zavoretti 2017a). The unhelpfulness of the modernity versus tradition framework is clear if we consider the social pressure to get married and have children experienced by urban educated ‘left-­over’ women. It is also evidenced in the experience of rural migrant workers in Chinese cities. Some researchers are seeing rural migrant women—long cast in the image of backwardness—in a new light. These women’s new mobility, adoption of urban consumption and search for love and a marriage partner are being viewed through the prism of becoming modern (Beynon 2004; Gaetano 2015; Pun 2005). Yet, traditional ideas of match-­making

8   Wanning Sun and Ling Yang and marriage may not be totally incompatible with ideas of romance and love. Migrant women’s embrace of love and romance may also be understood as the individual’s desire to fulfil a maternal role rather than her desire to reject tradition (Zavoretti 2017b). The extent to which an individual succeeds in negotiating the cultural and material changes in contemporary China can depend on one’s class position. Class inequality significantly shapes the extent and ways in which individuals from different socioeconomic groups engage in intimate relationships. In their search for an emotionally fulfilling marital relationship, individuals from marginalized groups in China face a market that stratifies their emotional experiences; they also confront the enduring structural discrimination designed by the state. Far from benefitting from the process of individualization, rural migrant women in the mobile regime of industrial modernization are torn between conflicting values and expectations.

Love stories before the twenty-­first century Like everywhere else in the world, in Chinese culture love is the most central leitmotif in literature and story-­telling. Despite claims that the notion of romantic love does not exist in Chinese traditions (Beach and Tesser 1988), studies of Chinese literature, especially of folk stories and narratives, suggest that even though Chinese narrative traditions emphasize companionship and enduring love, there is ample textual evidence in historical literature pointing to the pathos of romantic love (Jankowiak 1995b). Jankowiak’s survey of love stories on Chinese television in late 1987 convinced him that Chinese stories are not dissimilar to Amer­ican stories (Jankowiak 1995b). Undeniably, ideas about what constitute proper and legitimate attachments between men and women have been shaped by culturally specific traditional values and practices. In the case of China, orthodox Confucian discourses have accorded great importance to the institution of marriage because marriage is key to the continuance of the patriline. In The Book of Rites (Liji), one of the core texts of Confucian literature, Confucius (551–479 bc) was recorded as saying, ‘By means of the grand rite of marriage, the generations of men are continued through myriads of ages’. Due to this strong emphasis on the reproductive function of marriage, the inability to produce an heir was considered a major moral failing. Mencius (c.372–289 bc), a famous Confucian sage second only to Confucius himself, once claimed that ‘There are three ways to be unfilial; having no sons is the worst’. Deep concern about procreation and filial piety had been used to justify polygamy and a clear distinction between wife and concubine (Liu 1996, p. 27). Since marriage was understood as a union of two families, or ‘two different surnames’, to borrow the words from The Book of Rites, it was commonly arranged according to ‘parental order and matchmaker’s advice’ and young people generally had no say in their own marriage (Davis and Friedman 2014, p. 6; Liu 1996, p. 26; Yan 2003, pp. 47–48). While in Confucian classics the husband–wife relationship was preached as the most common form of human

Introduction   9 relationship and the foundation of social order, this relationship was maintained through distinct gender roles and gender segregation, rather than through mutual respect and affection (Liu 1996, p. 28). Hence, traditional heterosexual romance usually took place outside the family, ‘on the margins of society’, such as in a brothel or during a journey (Lee 2007, p. 31). The Confucian dictum ‘Between men and women there are only differences’ and the subsequent development of same-­sex emotional attachment (Fei [1947] 1992, p. 92) had also led to a flurry of writings on male same-­sex attraction throughout imperial China (Hinsch 1990; Shi 2008; Wu 2004; Zhang 2001). The scholar–beauty (caizi jiaren) romance is undoubtedly the most celebrated and influential narrative pattern of love in pre-­modern China. Archetypes of the model can be traced all the way back to ‘Guan ju’, the opening poem of The Classic of Poetry (Shijing, eleventh to sixth centuries bc) that depicts a young nobleman’s longing for an idealized fair lady (Su 2006, pp. 2–3). The love story of Sima Xiangru and Zhuo Wenjun is also widely viewed as an early precursor to the scholar–beauty romance (Song 2004; Su 2006; Wang 2010; Zhou 1995). First appearing in Sima Qian’s (c.145–90 bc) Records of the Historian, the story recounts how Zhuo Wenjun, the widowed daughter of a rich merchant, falls in love with Sima Xiangru because of his great literary and musical talent and she boldly elopes with him. The impoverished couple finally win the approval of Wenjun’s father and live a comfortable life. The Western Wing (Xixiang Ji) by Wang Shifu (1260?–1336?), a dramatic re-­creation of a Tang Dynasty (618–907) story, offers the first paradigmatic scholar–beauty narrative. Focusing on the love and marriage between the handsome young Student Zhang and the beautiful aristocratic girl Cui Yingying, the play contains all the standard elements of the romantic model, such as a fortuitous meeting between two people who fall in love at first sight, communication of their love through poetry, encountering objections and obstacles in the way of marriage, assistance from a helper, forced separation and eventual reunion after the scholar’s success in the imperial examination (Song 2004, p.  20). The most famous line in the play—‘May all lovers (youqingren) in the world be united in wedlock’—firmly connects romantic love with marriage and asserts the former as the basis of a desirable union. Because this notion of a love marriage challenged the legitimacy of the orthodox practice of arranged marriage in imperial China, the script of the play was frequently banned in later periods. This narrative model of love evolved into a highly formulaic fictional genre in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and served to promote conservative ‘gentry-­ class notions of masculinity and femininity’ (Song 2004, p. 20). However, some of the more progressive scholar–beauty narratives in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties articulated a fairly ‘modern’ vision of relationships by stressing the importance of affection, compatibility and equality in love and marriage (Wang 2010, p. 187). While the beauty was once characterized merely as a physically attractive young woman and the scholar was mostly noted for his literary talent, from the late Ming dynasty both the beauty and the scholar were required to possess talent, qing (feelings, sentiments) and good looks so that they could

10   Wanning Sun and Ling Yang be the ideal partners for one another. Qing, in particular, gained primacy over the other two qualities in the construction of a happy marriage (Wang 2010, pp.  248–249; Zhou 1995, p.  16). Tang Xianzu’s (1550–1616) masterpiece The Peony Pavilion (Mudan Ting Huanhun Ji) vividly represents the mysterious power of qing and women’s autonomy and agency in love. The heroine Du Liniang, ‘a quintessential symbol of qing’, first dies of lovesickness and is later revived by the power of qing (Huang 2001, p. 77). Throughout the play, it is Du Liniang ‘who has been taking the initiative’ and is eventually reunited with the object of her desire (Song 2004, p. 31). The scholar–beauty model has had a far-­reaching impact on Chinese literary tradition and popular minds. The great classic novel The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou Meng) by Cao Xueqing (c.1715–1763) is said to have ­borrowed many elements from scholar–beauty novels, even though it also voices criticism of the genre (Wang 2010; Zhou 1995). The model’s contemporary manifestation can be discerned in novels that feature a talented rural man who settles down in the city by passing the college entrance exam and obtaining higher education. The rural-­born intellectual then abandons his beautiful, faithful lover back in the countryside and starts a relationship with an urban woman (Qiao and Li 2011; see Chapters 5 and 6 in this volume for further discussion of rural–urban romance). As Haiyan Lee (2007) argues, concepts such as love, desire and intimacy reliably constitute the narrative about the formation of the modern subject. Lee’s genealogy of sentiment in the first half of the twentieth century in China makes it clear that ‘emotion talk’ is necessarily about identity, morality, gender, authority, power and community. For instance, left-­wing writers in the 1930s, faced with the question of how to negotiate the potential tensions between individuals’ erotic desires and the demands of the revolutionary cause, mostly adopted a revolution-­plus-love formula in their representation of romantic experiences. Despite various permutations of this formula, it is clear that revolution presents itself as both a motivation and a social milieu in which lovers can relate to one another while participating in revolutionary activities. In this sense, personal love is mobilized by revolution, and individual love stories necessarily unfold within the grand narrative of class, nation and revolution. As a literary formula, revolution-­plus-love is believed to have evolved from the political novel of the late Qing period, which is known for its concern with questions of cultural, national and racial identity (Liu 2003). This theme continued in the discourses of a new modern China that emerged during the May Fourth period, which began in 1919 and saw women’s emancipation. But it was during the revolutionary period that writings following the revolution-­plus-love formula emerged and proliferated. Some attribute the rise of this literary genre to the radicalization of the intelligentsia in the 1920s, and the need for patriots from both the left and right ends of the ideological spectrum to reconcile the tension between ‘revolutionary fervor’ and a ‘reluctance to relinquish the discourse of love’ (Lee 2007). One way of resolving this tension was to postpone love and subordinate the sexual relationship to the revolutionary agenda. However, as

Introduction   11 David Der-­Wei Wang (2004, p.  91) observes, while some—such as the writer Mao Dun—see revolution and love as in conflict, others—such as Jiang Guangci—see the dynamics between the two as part of a ‘coherent agenda through which the revolutionary subjectivity progresses from the domain of eros to that of polis’. This does not mean that all literary works on romantic love in modern China subscribe to the revolution-­plus-love paradigm. In fact, literary works such as those of Eileen Chang and Qian Zhongshu, who wrote in the 1940s, exist outside the leftist revolution-­plus-love paradigm and are widely read by people of both their own period and of today. Literary history also tells us that romantic love did not disappear in post-­1949 socialist literature. The revolution-­plus-love formula continued to evolve, albeit in various permutations. For instance, Xiao Erhei’s Marriage (小二黑结婚), by Zhao Shuli, transplanted the revolution-­plus-love formula from the social space inhabited by urban, elite intelligentsia to a rural, peasant and grassroots milieu. Here, political stories often took the form of love stories (Cai 2010, p.  147). While this framework for narrating romantic love greatly influenced socialist fiction of the 1949 to 1966 period, only the ‘true love of the proletariat’, which puts socialist values before private pleasure, was valued as legitimate (Evans 1997, p.  91). This formula was put to further political use during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), except that during this period, class struggle became the only narrative framework. Gender relations and individual affect were submerged beneath the theme of class identity and portrayed only in ways that served the ‘repressive power of the revolutionary discourse’ (Liu 2003, p. 174).

New genres of love in post-­Mao China Not surprisingly, when China emerged from the Cultural Revolution, writers, and the public in general, were eager to embrace another way of telling love stories, one in which the individual and the personal were privileged over the collective. To anthropologist Judith Farquhar (2002, p.  178), Zhang Jie’s short story Love Must Not Be Forgotten, published in 1979, signalled the beginning of an era when the romantic love between individuals opened up a domain in which people could ‘explore the possibilities for a personal life within the broader social transformation’. In what came to be called ‘scar literature’ or ‘wounded literature’, love was used to critically reflect the trauma of the political movements during Mao’s era, especially those of the Cultural Revolution. ‘Avant-­ garde’ writers such as Mo Yan and Su Tong used sex to deconstruct the myths of the nation and revolution (Liu 2003, p. 24). In the decades since the advent of economic reforms, a split has emerged between official and market-­oriented cultural expressions. Public discourses have all but abandoned revolution except as a trope to be parodied and deconstructed or preserved in the television adaptations of revolution-­themed literary classics—now often referred to as ‘Red Classics’ (Gong 2017). Expressions of sexuality, private pleasure and individual desire such as those by Wei Hui have tended to come more or less exclusively

12   Wanning Sun and Ling Yang from the market sector, combining consumerism with a postmodern play on female sexuality and representing the ultimate rejection of the revolution-­pluslove paradigm. Interestingly, while the search for love has never been more fervent, love has never felt more elusive. One cultural commentator in 新周刊 (New Weekly)—a leading chronicle of cultural trends in China—laments: ‘Love suffuses our Internet, dominates television dramas, and is dished up everywhere as chicken soup for the soul. But this linguistic excessiveness only highlights the fear and anxiety that real love has vanished’ (Sun 2015). As China heads for the third decade of the twenty-­first century, cultural texts suggest that it is no longer a case of ‘love must not be forgotten’. It seems more likely that, at a time when intimacy is increasingly commodified, ‘love can no longer be found’. The new millennium has seen the growing popularity of the xianxia genre, a type of narrative that involves immortal beings and the cultivation of immortality. Romantic love has thus been increasingly mystified and deified. The most passionate and undying love tends to happen between immortals in a spatially and temporally remote otherworld rooted in Chinese mythology, rather than between mortals in the real world. For instance, Tangqi Gongzi’s online novel To the Sky Kingdom (Sansheng sanshi shili taohua, 2008), which was adapted into a wildly popular television series in 2017, narrates the love and loyalty between two immortals in their past lives and later reincarnations. The 2015 hit television series The Journey of Flower (Hua qian gu) depicts the tragic love between an orphaned girl with access to the power of the demon and her saviour and master, an immortal being committed to protecting earthly beings. The 2018 popular web series Heavy Sweetness, Ash-­Like Frost (Xiangmi chenchen jinrushuang) details the awakening to love of the daughter of the flower deity through her love triangle with the Heavenly Prince and his step-­brother. Compared to the intensity and purity of love between immortal beings, love stories set in contemporary China are often compromised by earthly concerns and appear to be more banal and calculating. The Ode to Joy series (Huanle song, 2016, 2017), one of the most watched and discussed urban dramas in recent years, concerns five young women living on the same floor in an apartment block in Shanghai. Each woman represents a different social role and faces particular problems in her love life. Take the character Fan Shengmei, for example. Despite her charming appearance and decent job, the 30-year-­old ‘left-­over woman’ is forced by her sexist and exploitative birth family to become a gold digger, as she has to provide not only for her parents but also her brother’s family. The box office hit The Ex-­File 3: The Return of The Exes (Qianren 3: zaijian qianren, 2018) offers an honest portrayal of the painful breakup between two estranged lovers, Meng Yun and Lin Jia. Having lived together for five years, Lin Jia is eager to secure a husband, yet Meng Yun still wants to focus on his career. They break up after a squabble over trifles. While both harbour the hope of getting back together, they are eventually drawn apart by other suitors.

Introduction   13 Two notable web series in 2018, Women in Beijing (Beijing nüzi tujian) and Women in Shanghai (Shanghai nüzi tujian), further reveal the complexity of love and marriage and their entanglement with entrenched gender inequality and the unevenness of economic development. Both shows are local remakes of the Japanese web drama Tokyo Girls Picture Book (Tokyo Joshi Zukan, 2016–2017), and both employ the narrative formula of ‘a city full of possibility + a striving woman’ (Ai 2018, p. 55). In line with the recent trend of the ‘big heroine drama’ (danüzhu ju) that centres on the life trajectory and ascent to power of an obscure female protagonist (Li and Li 2018; Wang 2017), the two ‘women in the city’ series feature ambitious provincial young women, showing their struggles for a better life in the metropolis over the span of a decade. Chen Ke, the heroine of Women in Beijing, has relationships with a variety of men while climbing the career ladder. She breaks up with one boyfriend after he disapproves of her pursuit of professional advancement in Beijing and warns her that men do not like ‘women who have desires (you yuwang de nüren)’. Driven by the anxiety to settle down in Beijing, at the age of 30 Chen Ke marries a man who has a Beijing hukou (household registration), a stable job and an apartment, all of which are coveted assets in the contemporary marriage market. Her marriage, however, soon ends in divorce when she finds out that her husband is a mummy’s boy and her parents-­in-law distrust her financially because she is not a native Beijinger. The show ends with Chen Ke’s decision to start her own business in Beijing and her initiation of a relationship with a caring eye doctor from her hometown who fully appreciates her ambition. For career women like Chen Ke, love and marriage are by no means the only or ultimate goals in life. In addition to a fulfilling relationship, they are also searching for personal freedom, economic and spiritual independence, self-­realization and material comfort. Television and web series such as Ode to Joy and Women in Beijing are part of an ongoing boom in women-­oriented literature and culture (女性向文学和文 化). This boom first emerged and then blossomed in internet literature, before sweeping across other cultural industries, including comics, television, films and, most recently, online games. Since the beginning of the new millennium, Chinese internet literature has split along gender lines, with male and female writers each having built up their own writing communities and readership. To fully represent women’s notions of romantic love, women’s literary websites have fostered a number of new genres, tropes and styles (Feng 2013; Yang and Xu 2015). For instance, danmei, a genre of male same-­sex romance, has become extremely popular in women’s online writing (see Chapter 13 in this volume), because it provides a more egalitarian model of intimacy than heterosexual romance and facilitates women’s exploration of queer sexual identities and desires. In addition to the rise of new types of romance, significant changes have also occurred in traditional heterosexual romance. Due to female netizens’ widespread discontent with male infidelity (see Chapter 4 in this volume), one-­on-one relationships have gradually replaced love triangles and extramarital relationships as the mainstream relationship pattern in online urban romance (Zhou and Sun 2018, p. 31). Since the mostly female readers of online romance are seeking

14   Wanning Sun and Ling Yang relaxation and emotional comfort through their reading, they tend to prefer light-­ hearted ‘sweet stories’ (tianwen) that depict the affectionate interactions of a loving couple, and ‘pampering stories’ (chongwen) that demonstrate how one character, usually a powerful male, lavishes care and attention on his romantic interest. Another domain in which women are becoming a market force is the Chinese video game industry, which used to be dominated by male gamers. The phenomenal success of Love and Producer (Lian yu zhizuoren, 2017), a mobile role-­ playing game catering to a female demographic, signals the growing number and purchasing power of female gamers. Aside from its exquisite artwork and sophisticated plots, the game creates four attractive male suitors for the heroine: a genius scientist, a protective policeman, a domineering CEO and a charismatic superstar. Female players can develop romantic relationships with these perfect virtual boyfriends, although it costs them a large amount of money to do so (for more discussion of virtual boyfriends, see Chapter 10 in this volume). Fifty years ago, investigations into the cultural politics of texts and textual practices would have called for limited empirical investigation. Haiyan Lee’s genealogy of love from 1900 to 1950 needed to look no further than literature and public narratives in the print medium. Similarly, Cai Xiang’s investigation of the cultural production of narratives of revolution in socialist China from 1949 to 1966 needed only to consider textual material from literature, drama, short stories and cinema. In contrast, China’s cultural productions in the last several decades, especially in the new millennium, have been increasingly shaped by globalization, commercialization and technological change featuring digitalization. These processes have inexorably transformed the ways in which the ‘love story’ is told in the domain of public culture. This is due to three factors: (1) the new genres, forms and styles through which love and sexuality can be approached in the domain of the internet, reality television and social media; (2) the emergence of new public spaces, cultural practices and forms of knowledge of intimacy; and (3) the changing formation of subject positions and the emergence of new social identities (e.g. experts, virtual lovers, fans, celebrities). We therefore need to ask a different range of questions, such as: What are the new public spaces (both physical and discursive), cultural practices (e.g. virtual, performative) and new forms of knowledge (scientific, expert) about intimacy? How do these relate to traditional intimacy practices (embodied, marriage-­oriented and based on family and kinship)? This volume’s focus on millennial China provides a much-­needed empirical update to our understanding of the relationships between cultural forms, public discourses and social change in China. Existing scholarship has gone some way towards documenting the discursive and narrative developments in the first two decades of China’s economic reforms. But publications to date offer few insights into China during the last two decades. Yet the economic reforms during these two decades have been accompanied by a revolution in the ways in which love and intimacy are expressed and practised, due largely to the digitalization of everyday life. These later decades are also those during which the Gen Ys and

Introduction   15 the Millennials (those born in the 1990s and later) have come to assume dominance in the public arenas of cultural production and consumption. The last two decades have also seen the rise of an ‘intimate economy’ of services, practices and platforms that enable individuals to seek guidance and advice in negotiating personal dilemmas in a manner that was largely unavailable in the twentieth century. In light of the increasingly complex spaces and proliferation of practices and cultural forms, a deep and thorough investigation of the cultural politics of love and intimacy in the twenty-­first century calls for a hybrid approach, synthesizing research methods from a number of disciplines. This includes an institutional study of the production and consumption of media and cultural products, as well as textual and discourse analyses of media and cultural expressions in the mainstream and non-­mainstream, state and market spaces. It also requires empirical work to uncover emerging, new and changing social spaces, media forms, communication platforms, cultural practices and social and economic activities in the domains of intimacy. We also need ethnographic insights into the ways in which individuals—government officials, media professionals, citizens, consumers, activists, fans—adopt deliberate response strategies and/or make independent choices in the state-­sponsored neoliberal order of post-­Mao China.

Structure of this book This volume is divided into four closely connected and thematically overlapping sections that attempt to piece together a complex and nuanced picture of expressions of love and romance in the intimate sphere of contemporary China. Part I delves into expectations around marriage and the handling of relationship problems in post-­Mao China. Drawing on ethnographic data and historical review, Roberta Zavoretti (Chapter 2) analyses the ambivalence and contradictions embedded in post-­Mao discursive practices of courtship and marriage to show how class positions, gender roles, generational differences and ‘Chinese tradition’ work to produce conflicting notions of modern marriage. While Zavoretti highlights urban middle-­class men’s anxiety in seeking a suitable spouse, Haiping Liu (Chapter 3) dwells on the societal pressures on single women to find their ‘Mr Right’ and the rise of relationship experts who specifically target these anxious women. Combining ethnographic research with a critical analysis of ‘husband hunting’ manuals, Liu illustrates the ways in which relationship experts provide action strategies and shape new subjectivities in intimate romantic relationships. In Chapter 4, Yi Zhou details the gender and social ramifications of women’s digital literary practices in response to growing male infidelity and the rising divorce rate in contemporary China. Rather than seeking advice from profit-­driven counselling services, users of women’s literary websites have turned to creative writing and reading, constructing what Zhou describes as an ‘ethical practice’ for self-­healing, group support and collective action. Part II investigates how the institutionalized urban–rural inequality critically impacts on the sex and love lives and relationships of rural-­to-urban migrants.

16   Wanning Sun and Ling Yang Chapters 5 and 6 both draw on a wide range of literary and media texts to examine the genealogy and public imaginations of ‘archetypal’ figures that embody the negotiation of rural–urban, gender and class divides. In Chapter 5, Guoqing Zheng focuses on the figure of the ‘phoenix man’—a rural man who marries an urban woman; in Chapter 6, Yanwen Li explores the rural-­to-urban maid, whose search for intimacy often leads to involvement—voluntary or involuntary—with an urban man. Similarly, Tingting Liu (Chapter 7) deals with the sexual lives and romantic relationships of rural-­to-urban migrant male workers, but employs a different methodology and research focus. Liu’s chapter offers an ethnographic study of rural migrant men’s gendered longings and wounded masculinity, while also exploring the crucial role of digital media communication in shaping their life experiences and desires. Part III traces dominant, emergent and unconventional forms of intimacy in popular culture and public discourse and their entanglement with gender, class, and race norms. Through a case study of the longest running rural-­themed television drama in China, Rural Romantic Love Stories (Xiangcun aiqing gushi, 2006–present), Huike Wen (Chapter 8) examines televisual representations of romantic (or unromantic) love in the countryside, where patriarchal social order remains strong. Through a close reading of two literary bestsellers, Ling Yang (Chapter 9) analyses the writings of the post-­1980s generation to illustrate the search for alternative sources of happiness and meaning among urban youth. The persistence of gender stereotypes in the show studied by Wen form an interesting contrast with the revised gender scripts in the texts discussed by Yang and suggest a considerable gender gap between the urban and the rural. In Chapter 10, Chris K. K. Tan and Zhiwei Xu also touch on the dismantling of traditional gender roles. Drawing on the theory of the ‘social factory’, the chapter explores the immaterial affective labour performed by male virtual lovers, whose engagement with care-­for-money transactions breaks the long association of women with care-­giving jobs. Pan Wang (Chapter 11) offers a genealogy of the narratives of international romance and love in China from the 1980s to the 2010s, revealing how historical, social and political forces have altered public perceptions of the foreigner and intimacy between Chinese and non-­Chinese people. Just as virtual loving pushes the boundaries between (online) play and (offline) work, international romance also transcends geographical and racial boundaries. The last section, Part IV, examines cultural practices that challenge the legitimacy of heteronormativity and the institution of marriage. Both Jamie J. Zhao (Chapter 12) and Xiqing Zheng (Chapter 13) document queer online female fantasies in post-­2010 Chinese media and popular culture. Zhao examines how female ‘national-­husband’ (guomin laogong) figures in Chinese televisual, music, and celebrity industries open up progressive, albeit limited, gender-­ transgressive spaces for their female fans. Zheng analyses how danmei fan fictions based on The Disguiser—an espionage thriller set in Japanese-­occupied Shanghai during World War  II—enable their female writers and readers to re-­ envision communist revolution and homosexual love as a shared utopia of equality. Using ethnographic approaches and textual analyses, Maud Lavin (Chapter

Introduction   17 14) explores fans’ usage of Li Yuchun’s images to imagine female singledom and ‘differentiating’ normativities outside the hetero-­marital. Like Chapters 12 and 13, Lavin’s chapter reveals the creative and transformative use of popular culture by female consumers to articulate their non-­normative desires and longings. A scholarly book centred on love and love stories may seem baffling, trivial or even downright pointless to many scholars, especially those in the social sciences, such as international relations and geography. But to arts and humanities scholars in such fields as literature, cultural studies and anthropology, to understand the project of modernity is to understand matters of the heart such as love and romance. By insisting on linking love and intimacy with questions of social equality, moral contestation and cultural politics, the authors in this volume embody a much needed ‘intimate turn’ in our study of social change in contemporary China. In doing so, their work demonstrates the value such an approach offers to increasing our knowledge of ‘deep China’.

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Introduction   19 Jankowiak, William. 1995a. ‘Introduction’. In: Romantic Passion: The Universal Experience?, edited by William Jankowiak. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1–19. Jankowiak, William. 1995b. ‘Romantic Passion in the People’s Republic of China’. In: Romantic Passion: The Universal Experience?, edited by William Jankowiak. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 166–183. Jankowiak, William. 2011. ‘Romantic Love’. In: Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, edited by Dale Southerton. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, pp. 1234–1236. Jankowiak, William and Li, Xuan. 2017. ‘Emerging Conjugal Love, Mutual Affection and Female Marital Power’. In: Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the Twenty-­First Century, edited by Goncalo Santos and Stevan Harrell. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 146–162. Jeffreys, Elaine. (ed.). 2006. Sex and Sexuality in China. London: Routledge, pp. 21–42. Kam, Lucetta. 2013. Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Communities and Politics in Urban China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Lee, Haiyan. 2007. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Li, Zhi and Li, Pingting. 2018. ‘Xingbie yanjiu shiyexia de “danüzhu” dianshiju xian xiang pingxi’ [An Analysis of the Phenomenon of the ‘Big Heroine’ Television Drama from the Perspective of Gender Studies]. Zhongguo guangbo dianshi xuekan [China Radio & TV Academic Journal] 4: 104–107, 113. Liu, Houqin. 1996. ‘Ruxue yu handai hunyin zhidu’ [Confucianism and the Marriage System of the Han Dynasty]. Kongzi yanjiu [Studies on Confucius] 2: 25–30. Liu, Jianmei. 2003. Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women’s Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-­Century Chinese Fiction. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Kleinman, Arthur, Yan, Yunxiang, Jun, Jing, Lee, Sing, Zhang, Everett, Tianshu, Pan, Fei, Wu and Jinhua, Guo. 2011. Deep China: The Moral Life of a Person. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kong, Travis S. K. 2010. Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy. London: Routledge. Ong, Aihwa and Zhang, Li. 2008. ‘Introduction: Privatizing China: Powers of the self, socialism from afar’. In: Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar, edited by Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 1–20. Pan, Suiming. 2006. ‘Transformation in the Primary Life Cycle: The Origins and Nature of China’s Sexual Revolution’. In: Sex and Sexuality in China, edited by Elaine Jeffreys. London: Routledge, pp. 21–42. Pan, Suiming. 2017. 2000–2015 nian zhongguoren de ‘quanxing’ [Sexuality in China from 2000 to 2015]. Hong Kong: 1908 Press. Pan, Suiming and Huang, Yingying. 2013. Xingzhibian: ershiyi shiji zhongguoren de xingshenghuo [The Changes of Sexuality: The Sexual Lives of the Chinese People in the 21st Century]. Beijing: Renmin University Press. Pun, Ngai. 2005. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Qiao, Yigang and Li, Yanwen. 2011. ‘Jinsanshinian “chengxiang jiaocha didai xushi” zhongde “xincaizijiaren moshi”—yi Rensheng, Gaolaozhuang, Fengyasong wei zhongxin de kaocha’ [‘The New Scholar–Beauty Model’ in ‘Narratives of Urban and Rural Intersecting Areas’ in the Past Three Decades—A Study Focused on Life, Old Gao Village and Books of Odes]. Nankai xuebao [Nankai Journal] 4: 45–54.

20   Wanning Sun and Ling Yang Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Santos, Gonçalo and Harrell, Stevan. (eds.). 2017. Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the Twenty-­First Century. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Sassatelli, Roberta. 2011. ‘Individualization’. In: The Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, edited by Dale Southerton. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, pp. 764–768. Shi, Ye. 2008. Zhongguo gudai wenxue zhong de tongxinglian shuxie yanjiu [A Study of Writings on Homosexuality in Ancient Chinese Literature]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. Song, Geng. 2004. The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Su, Jianxin. 2006. Zhongguo caizijiaren xiaoshuo yanbian shi [The Evolution of Chinese Caizi-­jiaren Novel]. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press. Sun, Linlin. 2015. ‘2014 zhongguo aiqing baogao’ [Year 2014 Report on Love in China]. New Weekly, 4 February. http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_490075660102vhh0.html (accessed 3 November 2016). Sun, Wanning and Lei, Wei. 2017. ‘In Search of Intimacy: The Emergence of Advice Media for the Privatized Self ’. Communication, Culture & Critique 10 (1): 20–38. Wang, David Der-­wei. 2004. The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-­Century China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wang, Jian. 2017. ‘Nüxing baping—Dianshiju “danüzhu” xianxiang qianxi’ [Women Dominating the Screen—A Preliminary Analysis of the Phenomenon of ‘Big Heroine’ in Television]. Shiting Zongheng [Broadcast Television] 3: 38–40. Wang, Pan. 2015. Love and Marriage in Globalizing China. London: Routledge Wang, Ying. 2010. Caizijiaren xiaoshuo shilun [A Historical Study of Caizi-­jiaren Novel]. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press. Watson, Rubie S. 1991. ‘Afterword: Marriage and Gender Inequality’. In: Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society, edited by Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 347–368. Wu, Cuncun. 2004. Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China. London: Routledge. Xinhua. 2005. ‘Youyuan qianli laixianghui—zhongguo zehun banjing buduan kuoda’ [Destiny Will Bring Loves to Meet Even When They Are 1000 miles Apart—the Distance of Marriage Selection Has become Longer]. www.annian.net/show. aspx?id=15874&cid=17. Yan, Yunxiang. 2003. Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Yan, Yunxiang. 2009. The Individualization of Chinese Society. Oxford: Berg. Yan, Yunxiang. 2010. ‘The Chinese Path to Individualization’. British Journal of Sociology 61 (3): 489–512. Yang, Jie. 2015. Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yang, Ling and Xu, Yanrui. 2015. ‘Queer Texts, Gendered Imagination, and Popular Feminism in Chinese Web Literature’. In: Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism, and Media Cultures, edited by Elisabeth L. Engebretsen and William F. Shroeder. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, pp. 131–152. Zavoretti, Roberta. 2017a. ‘Being the Right Woman for “Mr Right”: Marriage and Household Politics in Present-­Day Nanjing’. In: Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the Twenty-­First Century, edited by Goncalo Santos and Stevan Harrell. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 129–145.

Introduction   21 Zavoretti, Roberta. 2017b. Rural Origins, City Lives, Class & Place in Contemporary China, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Zhang, Everett. 2011. ‘China’s Sexual Revolution’. In: Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person, edited by Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei and Guo Jinhua. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 106–151. Zhang, Jun and Sun, Peidong. 2014. ‘ “When Are You Going to Get Married?”: Parental Matchmaking and Middle-­Class Women in Contemporary Urban China’. In: Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China edited by Deborah Davis and Sara Friedman. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 118–146. Zhang, Li. 2014. ‘Bentuhua: Culturing Psychotherapy in Postsocialist China’. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 38 (2): 283–305. Zhang, Li. 2015. ‘The Rise of Therapeutic Governing in Postsocialist China’. Medical Anthropology: Cross-­Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 36 (1). doi:10.1080/01459 740.2015.1117079. Zhang, Li and Ong, Aihwa. 2008. Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zhang, Zaizhou. 2001. Aimei de licheng—zhongguo gudai tongxinglian shi [The Ambiguous Journey—A History of Homosexuality in Ancient China]. Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe. Zhao, Yuezhi. 1998. Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Zhao, Yuezhi. 2008. Communication in China: Political Economy, Power and Conflict. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Zhou, Jianyu. 1995. ‘The Caizi-­jiaren Novel: A Historical Study of a Genre of Chinese Narrative from the Seventeenth Century to the Nineteenth Century’. PhD dissertation, Princeton University. Zhou, Zhixiong and Sun, Min. 2018. ‘Wenhua shiye zhong de wangluo dushi yanqing xiaoshuo’ [Online Urban Romance in a Cultural Perspective]. Shanxi Daxue Xuebao [Journal of Shanxi University] 41 (4): 25–32.

Part I

Marriage in trouble

2 Is it better to cry in a BMW or laugh on a bicycle? Television shows, marriage and the production of class in urban China Roberta Zavoretti This chapter’s title refers to a statement made by a young woman named Ma Nuo during a 2010 episode of Feicheng Wurao, a popular matchmaking programme broadcast by Jiangsu TV, the official television channel of Jiangsu Province.1 Ma Nuo’s statement unleashed a debate among the programme’s viewers about the relationship between marriage and money, which was eventually picked up by the English-­speaking press (Lin 2010; Wong 2012; Wu 2010; Yang 2010). The popularity of Feicheng Wurao and the outrage caused by Ma Nuo’s words were still running high in 2011 when I went to Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu, in order to collect ethnographic data on marriage and class mobility in post-­Mao China. Marriage has been a prominent theme in the state’s modernization project in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Accordingly, the authority of the Chinese state is related to its ability to uphold an ideal of ‘modern’ marriage. But while Maoist ‘modern’ conjugality revolved around mutual affection and common political aims (the building of a socialist society), the Open Door Reform brought about different ways of practising courtship and marriage. Today, romance, not socialist conjugality, appears in the media and in advertisements as the lifeblood of ‘modern’ marriage. Notwithstanding the popularity of images of conjugal joy, however, ensuring a good marriage is the cause of much anxiety for many young people. Despite acknowledging that spouses should be ‘responsible’ (including materially) for each other, unmarried men complain loudly about the financial expectations placed on the groom’s family at marriage. At times, young men look to the Maoist past in order to find an ideal of conjugality that does not evoke a commercial transaction. Elderly parents also voice their opinions, as they articulate marriage as a ‘family affair’, in accordance with ‘Chinese tradition’. In order to play an active role in their children’s marriage choices, they gather in parks at weekends and look for prospective partners for them. These social gatherings are attended by an unusually mixed crowd, as exemplified by the different stories of Mr Wu and Mr Qian. Due to their different trajectories and class positions, their narratives provide different standpoints regarding the politics of marriage in post-­Mao China. Mr Qian, a successful businessman, praises the present day as a time of

26   Roberta Zavoretti romance and opportunity that was denied to him by Maoist society; at the same time, however, he ‘looks around’ to help his son find an ideal bride. Mr Wu, on the other hand, lost his feeling of self-­worth after spending many years looking for a wife. While he blames his condition on having lost his job in the 1980s, he explains his unwillingness to marry a divorcee in terms of ‘Chinese tradition’. These visions of marriage reconcile preference-­based conjugality with parental influence. The social and legal imperative of intergenerational support, combined with an ideal of conjugality based on essentialized gender roles, denote the social unit at the basis of the post-­Mao trope of middle-­class urban living. On the one hand, informants complain about the difficulties they face in attaining middle-­class conjugality; on the other, however, their anxiety highlights the appeal that this model exerts on urban society at large and the absence of a socially acceptable alternative to heteronormative marriage.

Introducing Ma Nuo Feicheng Wurao is widely recognized as the most popular matchmaking programme in the PRC (Sun 2018). It is often discussed in other media; the programme’s colourful website enables the public to read more about the participants, write them emails, watch previous episodes and sign up for participation. During an episode that was broadcast in March 2010, a female contestant, Ma Nuo, was invited by a young male contestant to take an evening bike ride with him. Ma Nuo’s reply was swift and piercing: ‘I’d rather cry in a BMW’. An 18-year-­old aspiring model, Ma Nuo was known for posting revealing pictures of herself on the internet. While her participation on Feicheng Wurao was a great chance to increase her visibility, her appearance on Jiangsu TV highlights the post-­Mao media’s readiness to depict female subject positions that would hardly have found space in the Maoist media (Evans 2002, 2006). Ma Nuo’s body, dress and deportment signalled a wish to be ‘looked at’ that in the eyes of most people made her similar to the ‘Western’ beauties of fashion advertisements. This association in turn linked her to the ideal of social attainment largely associated with ‘Western countries’ and, implicitly, with the free market (Evans 1997, p. 140). The episode unleashed an extensive media debate around the appropriateness of Ma Nuo’s words to the media: How could the provincial television channel allow a young woman to openly suggest that the worth of a man could be measured in monetary terms? Jiangsu TV, like other broadcasters in China, strives to appeal to audiences and attract advertising while at the same time maintaining strong financial and administrative links with provincial and state government.2 While this chapter cannot address the complexities of media governance in China, it is important to highlight that since the early 1980s the Chinese state has been keen on developing radio and television as ‘the most modern tools in encouraging the people of the nation to strive to create socialist civilization that is both materially and culturally rich’ (Li 1991, p. 341). Central state and provincial television channels are largely regarded by citizens as the government’s preferential vehicle for

Better to cry in a BMW or laugh on a bicycle?   27 d­ isseminating its views and are often expected to play a pedagogical role in society (Latham 2000). When I arrived in Nanjing in late 2011, I contacted a producer at Jiangsu TV in order to learn more about Feicheng Wurao. The young man, who I will call Jason, had been working on matchmaking programmes that pre-­dated Feicheng Wurao. When our discussion touched on Ma Nuo’s statement, I asked him whether the whole affair had been set up by the director to gain publicity. Jason claimed that there was ‘no need’ to set things up, emphasizing that Ma Nuo had done nothing more than speak her mind honestly and straightforwardly, and that her statement was representative of her generation: She is a girl of the 90s.3 She says everything that goes through her mind. The director did not give her any instruction but ‘be yourself, say what you think’. She is a Beijing girl, a spoilt only child. She wanted to be seen on TV, and when she pronounced that sentence (‘I’d rather cry in a BMW’) she became very famous, her public increased. People criticized her, and as a consequence she was even more at the centre of general attention. Far from being a mere confirmation of common sense, Ma Nuo’s statement produced a stir in the media, as well as a reshuffle in the programme’s broadcasting team. After the episode, in fact, the management of Jiangsu TV brought onto the programme a third host, a (female) Chinese Communist Party (CCP) school professor. These changes reflected the leadership’s wish to publicly support an idea of courtship and marriage that was different from the one Ma Nuo had suggested.

Love and marriage: the official view It may seem surprising that the public statement of a young woman with little authority caused such an outcry both within and outside of official media. Yet it is worth remembering that policies governing marriage have always been held up by the CCP as an example of its efforts to foster and bring about a ‘modern’ society. Before the proclamation of the PRC in 1949, the communist leadership looked for popular support by promising easier access to marriage to young men, and sexual equality to women (Ocko 1991; Watson 1991, p. 358). The idea of ‘women’s equality’ was pivotal to the socialist imaginary, since colonial administrators, foreign observers and China’s (male) educated elite had long seen Chinese women’s condition as a measure of the country’s ability to become ‘modern’ (Rofel 1999, pp. 20–21). In order to consolidate its legitimacy, the new leadership produced a new Marriage Law in 1950 which, in its first article, rejected arranged and forced marriage as feudal arrangements (Croll 1981, pp. 1–6; Palmer 1995). According to the new law, marriage had to be an expression of the spouses’ free choice and of equality between the sexes. Both spouses had the right to divorce, and child betrothal and concubinage were outlawed. Legally, mutual

28   Roberta Zavoretti affection became the required basis for marriage, and monogamous marriage became the state-­approved arena for love and sex, as well as ‘an essential prerequisite to family continuity’ (Croll 1981; Whyte 1993, p. 189). The idea that the spouses-­to-be should decide on their own marriage had already been supported by the modernist movements of the Late Qing and Republican era. However, at that time these ideas had affected only the urban, educated elites (Watson 1991; Whyte 1990, p. 183, 1993, p. 182). As personal choice became the pivotal element in the official vision of ‘modern’ marriage, the nature of ‘love’ and the appropriate ways to achieve it became central themes in official writings aimed at popularizing the new model of marriage (Evans 1997, p. 88). The implementation of the Marriage Law, however, had mixed results. The party/state adopted a paternalistic and conciliatory approach on issues that most affected women and young people, such as free choice in marriage (Croll 1981; Evans 1997; Ocko 1991; Watson 1991; Whyte 1990, 1993; Wolf 1985). Local cadres were reticent to interfere in what they perceived to be private affairs belonging to the domain of the family (Croll 1981, pp.  172–174). In addition, since state policy described courtship as strictly functional to marriage, people were at loss in establishing what kinds of pre-­marital contacts could be deemed ‘respectable’. Many young people were not accustomed to thinking about marriage in terms of love, and for this reason the central leadership had to clearly spell out its meaning in official publications (Croll 1981; Evans 1997, p. 88). The mixed outcome of the law’s implementation was also the result of political and economic factors. In rural areas, land reform and collectivization did not weaken but instead reinforced the importance of existing kin and household and neighbourhood-­based ties, thus consolidating the role of parents in marriage negotiations (Croll 1981, p. 86; Lavely 1991; Watson 1991). In the cities, the establishment of a state-­led centralized system for the distribution of goods and services compelled Chinese citizens to rely once more on immediate family connections in order to secure access. Accordingly, most unions could hardly take place without the support of parents and relatives. Despite the formal emphasis on love and free choice, then, marriage became the object of careful negotiations between both families and generations (Davis 1993; Whyte 1993). Restrictions on wedding celebrations and exchanges were followed only to a relative extent, notwithstanding the fear of social and state censorship (Siu 1993; Whyte 1990, 1993). Despite these shortcomings, the Marriage Law of 1950 constituted an unprecedented vehicle through which young people could challenge their parents’ authority and women could claim the right to divorce and hold property by calling on the support of the state (Croll 1981; Ocko, 1991; Whyte 1993). The law also enabled the party/state to discursively produce the pre-­revolutionary era as a time of feudal oppression. Accordingly, decades after its establishment, those who admitted shortcomings in the law’s implementation could readily frame these failures as ‘remnants of feudal thought’ (Croll 1981; Ocko 1991, pp. 337–338).

Better to cry in a BMW or laugh on a bicycle?   29 After the death of Mao in 1976, the Open Door Reform ushered in visible changes to the practice of courtship and marriage (Yan 2011). The state-­led expansion of the market economy and the spread of consumer culture has created unprecedented spaces of consumption where young people can move about freely. However, ‘active sexual involvement before marriage is still widely treated as a mark of immorality and irresponsibility’ (Evans 1997, p.  83). According to official policies, courtship should aim at marriage, which constitutes the legitimate arena for sexual relationships (Evans 1997, pp.  100–104; Palmer 1995).4 This tension is reflected in commercial publications targeted at young people, where the images of young, beautiful women in alluring poses are often presented alongside texts that urge young people to practice self-­restraint (Evans 1997). These publications suggest to the reader that ‘in a social context governed by market emphasis on consumer interests, individual initiative and enrichment’ (Evans 1997, p.  98) sexual desire is a legitimate component of love, and that love itself belongs to the private, not the collective, sphere.5 The need for material comfort and for sexual fulfilment are associated with marriage across the spectrum of state-­led propaganda and media, and are widely recognized as important parts of a couple’s marital life in urban China (Evans 1997; Yan 2011). The relocation of love and sexuality from the collective to the private realm, however, heralds new forms of state control over these discursive spheres. In continuity with post-­Liberation discourses on sexuality, official publications establish a clear-­cut difference between active, autonomous male desire and female sexuality, which needs to be aroused by men and is inevitably subsumed under women’s ‘natural’ aspirations: motherhood and family. As political comradeship ceases to be the main component of a good marriage, love and sexuality become an important element of a stable family life, and hence key to population control and the stability of ‘modern’ Chinese society (Evans 1997, pp. 104–111; Yan 2011, pp. 216–217). Discourses of ‘natural’ sexual difference are all the more powerful as they are presented as opposed to the gender ‘sameness’ that allegedly dominated Maoist social life. According to this view, the end of Maoism allowed Chinese people to unleash their individualities and follow their ‘natural’ masculinities and femininities (Rofel 1999, pp. 219–220). While official publications cast ‘sexual gratification as one of the great bonuses of the [Open Door] reform programme’ (Evans 1997, p. 82), they also suggest that the end of Maoist puritanism allowed Chinese women to rediscover and express their ‘innate’ beauty (Evans 2006). These gender-­specific ‘natural’ pleasures are articulated in terms of a global imaginary of modernity driven by market transition (Rofel 1999, p. 220). In this context, a new Marriage Law was introduced in 1981, with further major revisions in 2001 and several amendments later on.6 The renewed emphasis on free choice in marriage ‘gave implicit acknowledgement to the very partial success of the 1950s programme’ (Evans 1997, p.  86). Overall, these amendments indicated the family as the basic unit of Chinese society in the context of

30   Roberta Zavoretti the declining power of the work unit—for example, by restating children’s responsibility for the support of the elderly (Croll 1999; Palmer 1995, 2007).

Love and responsibility It is in this context that the management of Jiangsu TV took measures to ensure that its most popular programme made reference to the ‘right’ way to love and marry: courtship and marriage should be based on reciprocal affection and ensure long-­term, stable companionship. In order to achieve this stability, marriage should be fostered by both parties’ sense of responsibility (zeren) and spouses should provide long-­lasting support for each other, their families and their children. Most of my unmarried, heterosexual informants had similar expectations of marriage. Expressions such as ‘fulfilling (one’s) responsibility’ (fu zeren) constantly recurred during interviews and were extremely prominent during ritual occasions linked to marriage and childbearing. Wedding ceremonies, for example, invariably included public declarations of ‘love’ in which the idea of ‘fulfilling (one’s) responsibility’ was routinely invoked. On these occasions the host—generally a professional entertainer hired for the event—and the couple would perform on a stage in front of the guests. While performances could vary greatly, the groom was almost always invited to declare his love for the bride, most often in terms of ‘fu zeren’. In other cases, it was up to the host to describe the couple’s love for each other and their (in particular, the groom’s) readiness to fu zeren. There may be innumerable variations on this theme, but the idea that the spouses, and in particular the groom, had to love their partners by taking responsibility for the family was consistent. In his study of state–society relations in South China, Ku (2003) defines the concept of responsibility as at the very core of social relationships (guanxi); in turn, a relationship implies the presence of reciprocal feelings (ganqing) and responsibility (zeren). While in Reform China the authorities have articulated various official policies in terms of zeren, the concept is mostly enacted through practices pertaining to moral and emotional discursive fields, such as those related to family ties and friendship. Ties based on zeren imply mutual reciprocity between parties and the respect of ‘social, legal or moral ties as defined by a contract or a promise, for example’ (Ku 2003, p. 16). ‘Taking responsibility’ is therefore a fundamental part of marriage: those who delay marriage expose themselves to criticism that they ‘do not want to take responsibility’ towards their families. By not marrying, in fact, they deliberately avoid having children, putting into question the circle of reciprocity of care that links them to their parents (Ku 2003). This idea of ‘responsibility’ in marriage refers to what Charles Stafford (2000) has called the cycle of yang: relations of material and emotional support that both bride and groom should cultivate with their children, their parents and their parents-­in-law. This legal and social emphasis on intergenerational support complements the reforms of state-­provided social security that, throughout the 1990s, recast the family as

Better to cry in a BMW or laugh on a bicycle?   31 responsible for intergenerational care (Croll 1999; Palmer 2007). Taking responsibility through marriage has a strong material element, but this is articulated as a function of emotional attachment, as if family-­wide support was a necessary by-­product of conjugal affection.

Marriage in a time of insecurity For men, therefore, expressing ‘love’ for a future spouse implies accepting responsibility for providing sustained support to her, their children and their parents. Most bachelors I spoke to agreed with this idea but found Ma Nuo’s standards of material security a bit too conspicuous. Like Jason, many considered Ma Nuo as representative of a generation born and bred within late Reform society: citizens who allegedly focused on consumption as their main aim in life, holding purchasing power as a measure of personal happiness (Yan 2011, pp.  220–221). Their views of marriage, according to Jason, were very different from those held by those who, like his parents, were born in the 1950s and had married for love, rather than for material gain. Jason alluded to his perception of the Maoist years as a time in which social difference was not primarily expressed in financial terms, and young people were encouraged to articulate their feelings according to lofty ideals. Jason, a successful professional from a comfortable urban-­based family, had not experienced life in the heyday of Maoism, nor did he come across as nostalgic of the Maoist past (Ku 2003, p. 147; Rofel 1999, pp. 128–137). However, he was dissatisfied with present-­day practices of courtship and marriage, which in his view revolved around sheer hedonism; these marriages, he thought, were not based on authentic feelings, which had been at the centre of Maoist ideals of conjugality. Similarly, the young men I interviewed around the university campuses complained about the basic conditions they had to meet in order to be considered ‘eligible bachelors’. These young men would soon obtain prestigious degrees, and their job prospects were not hopeless. However, they felt the pressure to secure a steady, well-­paid job, and worried about the general expectation that they should buy a flat for their new family in the context of steadily rising property prices. Even when unsolicited, these preoccupations repeatedly emerged from general conversations about coupling and marriage. Shortly after my first interview with Jason, another ‘young professional’ expressed his anger about Ma Nuo’s statement: ‘It’s not strange for television to give space to this kind of people [like Ma Nuo] or statements. One may instead want to know how people can have similar opinions!’. For this young man, Ma Nuo’s attitude was all the more arrogant as she clearly consumed fashion in order to eroticize her body for male consumption. As already mentioned, Ma Nuo’s body and deportment constituted a signifier of social attainment that could be readily associated with the reforms that had allowed people to make money (Evans 1997, pp. 140–141). In this context, her demands for a BMW were consistent with her image insofar as the car constituted an appropriate reward for her body management: an emblem of wealth, status and modernity that could be read globally. Ma Nuo therefore

32   Roberta Zavoretti constituted a divisive figure, because her image combined sexual appeal with the unscrupulous side of market competition. Ma Nuo had spoken during a matchmaking programme, implicitly suggesting that an ‘uncivil individualist’ (Yan 2011, p. 224) like her could become a wife, mixing up marriage with mercenary exchange. Unsurprisingly, Ma Nuo’s image hardly corresponded to my young respondents’ ideal of wife, which prescribed that a woman had to be pretty, but also sweet and good-­tempered. Young men also mentioned that an ideal wife ‘should not have had too many boyfriends before me’. These were the qualities that enabled young women to ‘be responsible’ for their future families according to their ‘natural’ sexual differences. While having the right to her own profession, a woman had also to devote time and energy to the demands of the three-­ generation family (Evans 1997, 2002). Accordingly, prospective husbands were generally expected to bear the lion’s share of the marriage expenses and provide their new families with a place to live. This did not mean that the bride was dispensed from the duty to provide material support for her family. Young women, too, were expected to perform in their careers, especially if they were an only child; at the same time, however, they were also subjected to a range of competing, often mutually contrasting, demands as they negotiated their relationships with families, the state and the market (Gottschang 2001). These complexities were reflected in young women’s anxieties about marriage, which revolved around multiple, contradictory issues. These views correspond to strong continuities in the state’s discursive construction of the conjugal ideal since the 1950s. While Mao-­era women were encouraged to better themselves through work and serve their husbands ‘in the name of the public good’, post-­Mao official discourses on conjugality remind both women and men that women should focus on supporting their overburdened husbands and raising good children (Evans 1997, pp. 129–134, 2002). These linkages correspond to continuities in the political economy of marriage across Liberation and the Open Door Reform. Wedding transfers, for example, were an important feature of pre-­Liberation marriage practices, and partially declined—without disappearing—only because of strong state intervention during the 1950s (Siu 1993; Whyte 1993). Since China’s transition to a market economy, the choice of marriage partners and marriage transfers have played an increasingly important role in the realignment of class positions for young couples and their families. Thus, while for women marrying a man with a house and a good job ensures a comfortable future, for a man finding the right bride allows him to acquire symbolic and social capital that could help him and his family to advance their position in post-­Mao society. Housing, in particular, plays a key role in class formation and gender relations. As men are expected to purchase a home for women as a guarantee of security for the whole family, it becomes a fundamental element in the articulation of self-­worth for both men and women (Zhang 2010). Young peoples’ anxiety, therefore, is linked to the importance that making a good marriage held in the context of class formation in post-­Mao China. Many

Better to cry in a BMW or laugh on a bicycle?   33 elderly parents, feeling responsible for making sure their children will marry well (Stafford 2000, p.  109), spend their weekends gathering in parks to exchange children’s resumes, a practice subsumed under the larger category of ‘xiangqin’.7 Xiangqin denotes all those practices through which people evaluate possible marriage partners. Matchmaking agencies promote similar fairs in parks or commercial spaces, but these gather less attention since they are largely seen as marketing devices for the agencies themselves. At the xiangqin fairs I attended during fieldwork, parents hung profiles of their children on walls or on ropes, waited for interested people to come forward, or otherwise strolled around, looking at each other, chatting in small groups and reading the profiles hung up by other people. If they found someone ‘compatible’ with their children, they took their phone number. Standard information on the profiles included age and/or Chinese zodiac sign, height, weight, educational level, occupation and salary. Some of the men’s profiles mentioned their good character; others highlighted home ownership as a bonus. Women’s profiles highlighted desirable physical and/or temperamental features. During my first visits to the xiangqin fair at the most central park in Nanjing, I asked the elderly parents I met why their children did not come themselves. The general reply was: ‘They’d feel they are losing face!’. These meetings offered parents a chance to ‘give a hand’ to their children in a matter that, according to them, was of serious concern for the family. Parents, they added, should help their children to find a good partner, lest they be deceived into an imprudent marriage. The people I met at the xiangqin fairs were socially heterogeneous. One of the regulars was Mr Wu, who was so ashamed of his single status that at our first meeting at the fair he pretended to be looking for a spouse for his daughter. It was only after several meetings that he told me he was looking for a wife. In China, life-­long bachelorhood is seen as a failure to attain fully-­fledged adulthood and become ‘real Chinese men’. State policy and Western academic discourse label China’s unmarried men as ‘surplus men’, a danger to the social order (Greenhalgh 2012). Yet Mr Wu—a tall, well-­dressed, pleasant-­looking man in his fifties—did not at all correspond to the widely shared stereotype of the ‘bare branch’ (guanggun): the low-­quality, rustic bachelor (Han 2009). Therefore, I asked him why, in his view, he had not been able to marry before. He promptly replied: I have been thinking about this a lot. I think it’s because of my job troubles. You know, with the Reform, lots of things changed. At that time, I had just started to work. My factory closed down and many of us lost their jobs (xiagang). Maybe you cannot understand, because nowadays losing one’s job (shiye) is quite common (zhengchang). At that time it was not … it was something new … at that time people would have a job for life. If you were xiagang, people thought you were weird, they could think there was something wrong with you, and that for that reason you had lost your job. Think about it! In that situation, one can lose all his self-­confidence (zixin)! One can start thinking that he is really different from the others … it took me a

34   Roberta Zavoretti while to get out of that predicament. Eventually, I managed to start my own business, and now I cannot complain … my income is certainly not low. But in the meantime, the years passed, and I lost many opportunities. At my age, most women are already married, and I do not want to marry someone who has experienced a divorce. We Chinese do not like to marry people who have already divorced … at least, I do not want to. You may feel this is a traditional attitude … you are a foreigner. I asked Mr Wu whether his friends and family members had helped him by introducing him to single women, as custom would suggest. He replied that they had done so, but that he had not liked many of these women. ‘And those I liked, did not like me back,’ he added. ‘So, you see, it’s complicated,’ Mr Wu concluded. ‘Once we used to be told that we were different from the foreigners, that they were capitalists. Now we can even talk to the foreigners!’ For Mr Wu, his failure to find a suitable match was closely linked with the experience of the Open Door Reform. For him ‘jumping into the sea’ (xiahai) had been the only way out of unemployment, but after more than 30 years and despite his comfortable income he was still struggling to make sense of the political, economic and social changes that he had witnessed. His words and restrained attitude highlighted that his inability to marry at the age commonly deemed appropriate had seriously affected his self-­worth and was perceived as a failure by him as much as by others. Mr Wu’s dissatisfaction was shared by many of the people I met at the xiangqin fair. These people complained loudly about how in recent years disparities between rich and poor had grown ‘too much’. Their concerns centred on the assertion that ‘keeping a job’ had become increasingly difficult, and that housing, health and education were becoming more costly. These services used to be provided for free through the work-­unit during Maoist times, and for this reason they were often seen as entitlements by urban residents (Croll 1999).

Marriage in a time of opportunity While for many the Open Door Reform had brought about uncertainty, other people I met at the xiangqin fair seemed to have fared well after the end of Maoism. One example is Mr Qian, who hailed from the northern city of Shenyang, but had been living in Nanjing for the past 30 years. Now in his late fifties, he held a managerial position in the car industry, and when we first met at the xiangqin fair he was looking for a girlfriend for his 28-year-­old son. Mr Qian’s high-­quality attire immediately set him apart from the crowd of people shivering in cheap clothing. At our second meeting, Mr Qian picked me up in his large Volkswagen and insisted on driving to a shopping mall where, he said, he could easily find a parking space. While driving, Mr Qian explained: In China, marriage is something that involves two families. For this reason, when you go to xiangqin [fair], you see few young people, but many

Better to cry in a BMW or laugh on a bicycle?   35 parents. One tries to get an idea about the children on the basis of what the parents look like. For this reason, I almost never find anyone to introduce to my son. I need to find someone that inspires trust, someone whom I can consider a ‘good’ (bucuo) person. When I asked whether he was perhaps more demanding than his son, Mr Qian was quick to agree and justify his position: Of course. The father’s life experience influences the son’s life. And besides, things are not as they used to be when I was young. Back then, men and women did not have so many chances of being together. Someone would introduce a person to you, and unless you had serious reasons to reject her, there was not much further discussion. One would have felt bad if he had refused, as if he had been in the wrong.… So once they had introduced a woman to you, you would marry her after a short time. Now it is different. There are many opportunities, young people always have more chances to meet somebody else. If a man has a girlfriend, he still thinks that he could meet another one, a better one. For Mr Qian, the present signified chances that had been denied to the older generation—for example, the opportunity to have ‘fun’ through pre-­marital romantic adventures. From this point of view, the moment of ‘settling down’ was indefinitely deferred, as the possibility of meeting a more beautiful, more exciting woman would always be there. Accordingly, Mr Qian used to joke about the fact that while he was keen for his son to get married, his son did not seem to be in a hurry: My son has been travelling, he studied and worked in different European countries: Italy, Germany and Switzerland. Now he works for a magazine … most of his colleagues are married women, some of them way older than him. So he does not have many opportunities [to find a girlfriend] at work. And then he is very busy, he has to work overtime every day.… So I come to the park to take a look around for him. I understand him … a young man like him, who has travelled the world … his vision opened up, you see. As soon as his eyes see something, they already move on to look somewhere else. According to Mr Qian, his son was a man of his time, who had travelled and seen the world, and maintained the same entrepreneurial, cosmopolitan attitude in his personal dealings with women. Mr Qian thought sooner or later his son would have had to marry anyway; in the meantime, he could make the most of the opportunities that the present time allowed him, and look for personal happiness through the pursuit of a hedonist lifestyle (Rofel 2007; Yan 2011). Mr Qian’s constant talk about his son seemed all the more conspicuous since he did not mention any other family member unless I explicitly asked him. When I asked how he had met his wife he replied:

36   Roberta Zavoretti We were both in the army. That is how we met each other. Then our superior suggested that we get together. He was concerned about the fact that none of us was married yet,8 so he thought we would be a good match. Since Mr Qian did not hide the fact that his marriage was unhappy, I asked whether he had considered refusing the match. He replied: ‘It would not have been possible to refuse. It would have felt wrong towards the person, and in addition it had been our superior who had suggested it.’ Mr Qian’s account contrasted with Jason’s views on marriage in Maoist times, just as Jason’s accounts of post-­Mao courtship clashed with Mr Qian’s views of his son’s romantic exploits. Their accounts were not faithful reports of facts; rather, they resided in the tension between ‘a historicity of knowledge and the knowledge of history’, and hence each of them can be used to ‘critically interrupt’ the other and destabilize its narrative of emancipation (Rofel 1999, pp. 148–149). Jason’s looking back at Maoist times in search of ‘true feelings’ underlines Mr Qian’s anxieties about the future: his concerns for his son’s marriage, which was indefinitely deferred as the young man was too busy enjoying the present. Once at the shopping mall Mr Qian suggested having tea at the local Starbuck’s coffee shop. Although he liked that café, he said, it could not compare with the glamour of neighbouring Shanghai. In his view, Shanghai was a truly international, civilised (wenming) metropolis, where people’s ‘quality’ (suzhi) was higher, the buildings more glamorous and the shops more fashionable than in Nanjing. Mr Qian also appreciated the European countries he had visited, admiring their culture. ‘People in Europe are quite civilised,’ he told me as we were sitting in his car on our way back to the city centre. ‘Not like here. You can see it from how people drive. Look at this!,’ he said, while we were overtaken on the wrong side. He added: ‘This would not happen in Europe, right? Or if it did, the driver would be fined. But people in China lack proper driving education, so they drive in an uncivilised way.’ As Mr Qian praised Shanghai and European countries in opposition to the rest of China, Shanghai emerged as the example of how the Open Door Reform had improved, and could further improve, China. Shanghai’s material success was the foundation of its being civilized vis à vis other parts of China (Anagnost 1997, pp.  80–81; Liu 2009, pp.  174–175). Mr Qian’s overt support for post-­Mao commercialization set him apart once again not only from Jason but also from Mr Wu. While Mr Qian had been able to capitalize on an already privileged status (he and his wife were in the Army), Mr Wu had lost economic security following the reconversion of the industrial sector that took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Mr Wu’s comments reflected the ‘world of China’ (Liu 2009, p. 173) and indicated his political and emotional uneasiness vis à vis ‘foreigners’; Mr Qian’s assertions, on the other hand, confidently referred to foreign countries and to Shanghai, a global commercial hub and emblem city of the Open Door Reform, highlighting his desire to come across as a ‘citizen of the world’.

Better to cry in a BMW or laugh on a bicycle?   37 Mr Wu and Mr Qian’s different experiences of social mobility influenced their respective positions towards the state’s project of modernity. Their class positions and their political views were also related to—and tellingly reflected— their different views and experiences of marriage. Mr Wu, as other bachelors, struggled to find a wife because of his perceived failure to succeed in a competitive market economy. During his afternoons at the park, he hung out at the margins of the fair with other bachelors and lamented the breaking of the ‘iron rice bowl’. Mr Qian, however, clearly articulated his desires through the vocabulary of the post-­Mao tropes of modernity. If his son had married a foreigner, he said, he would have welcomed the match, because he thought China had to keep opening up to foreigners. Despite being different, the two men had views in common, too. Both men believed that marriage should be based on personal preference; yet, in different ways and for different reasons, both felt that this wish had been frustrated. Mr Wu, however, seemed to be almost resigned to his situation, while Mr Qian had a strong feeling of self-­worth and enjoyed aspects of life that were accessible to him due to his high income. Mr Qian thought that, because of the never-­ending romantic opportunities of the present day, his son was going to be freer than him in his marriage choices, and this might propel him even further in the globalized world. Yet, Mr Qian’s account of his son as the modern, internationally competitive Chinese man seemed to describe an ideal of a cosmopolitan, ‘high quality’ masculinity, rather than a person with specific psychological traits.9 His narration of his son’s limitless dating opportunities appeared all the more emancipatory as it was discursively opposed to his own marriage, which had been arranged according to the logic of Maoist collectivism. Besides their feeling of frustration about marriage choices, both men were attached to ideas that they themselves defined as ‘traditional’ and ‘Chinese’. As the parents at the xiangqin fair had explained to me, Mr Wu and Mr Qian thought that marriage was a family affair, and that this was a specific trait of Chinese marriage. Mr Wu explicitly said that his attachment to what he considered to be a ‘Chinese tradition’—his unwillingness to marry a divorced woman—accounted for much of his difficulty in finding a wife of his own age. Mr Qian, in turn, blamed his unhappy marriage on the pressure he had experienced from his army superior. He went on to note that in ‘the West’ people did not experience social pressures to agree to a match, evoking a widely held view according to which ‘the individual’ was an essentially Western category, and ‘the West’ constituted a space of absolute individual autonomy. While (or perhaps because) the idea of an individual-­centred West had been demonized during Maoist times (Yan 2011), Mr Qian appreciated many of its facets; however, he still took it upon himself to ‘take a look around’ on behalf of his son, because ‘in China’ marriage concerned the whole family. The idea of a ‘Chinese tradition’ that puts the family at the centre of everything recalls the idea of responsibility (zeren), which recurred in conversations about love and marriage. It is noteworthy that, while my informants mentioned the importance of ‘Chinese tradition’ in marriage, they also all agreed on the

38   Roberta Zavoretti importance of personal preference in marriage choice and saw it as key to having a ‘modern’ marriage. In this view, ‘Chinese tradition’ does not represent an impediment to modernity or modernization but constitutes the fine national past that provides the moral foundation for a dominant modernity (Rofel 1999). The narrative of a common ‘Chinese tradition’ also allows a tempering of the contradictions and social inequalities that emerge at the xiangqin fair. However, while most people at the fair were keen to re-­claim the ‘fine national tradition’ as their own, it was evident that some were in a better position than others to fulfil the responsibility that the same ‘Chinese tradition’ placed on them. For example, Mr Wu had, for some time, felt unable to compete successfully in the new market economy and to guarantee a secure future for a prospective bride and family. Mr Qian, on the other hand, had achieved a good income after the Reform. Instead of showing anxiety, he was keen on securing a prestigious alliance for his son. When I asked him what he thought about Ma Nuo’s blunt statement, Mr Qian was not critical, but rather sympathetic with her point of view: ‘I think it’s understandable. Life is very short. Why not enjoy it to the full?’. I objected that Ma Nuo had said she would rather cry in a BMW. Did that sound like enjoyment to him? Mr Qian jovially replied that crying was never enjoyable, but sooner or later one would have to face difficulties, and at that time it would be better to be in a BMW than on a bicycle. In Mr Qian’s view, Ma Nuo had legitimately claimed her right to ‘enjoy her life to the full’: a desire that was natural and human, and as such easy to understand. Post-­Mao consumer society offered ample opportunities for such enjoyment, insofar far as the consumer/citizen could count on a high disposable income. Mr Qian’s standpoint differed from that held by many young people. He had already married, had a son, and having already fulfilled family-­related social expectations he was not looking for a ‘good mother’ for his future children. Equally importantly, he was a wealthy and successful businessman; he delighted in displaying his wealth through consumption, and took much pride in his taste for the good things in life. Young women like Ma Nuo might well embody these desires for prestige and enjoyment; Mr Qian, in turn, could easily provide what Ma Nuo asked for. Mr Qian’s wife, on the other hand, emerged from his description as a flaw in what would otherwise have been an enviable life: an ‘old bicycle’ waiting to be put aside for a ‘fast car’.

Conclusion Li Zhang argues that in present-­day urban China people’s feelings of self-­worth increasingly emerge from the tension between the discursive field of love and emotions and that of property and wealth. Since these discursive fields are strongly gendered, these feelings of self-­worth are mainly articulated through distinct enactments of masculinity and femininity (Zhang 2010). A man like Mr Qian could easily fulfil Ma Nuo’s requirements by displaying his wealth and flattering his own feelings of self-­worth. In other words, as a wealthy, cosmopolitan

Better to cry in a BMW or laugh on a bicycle?   39 man, Mr Qian felt that he could ‘take responsibility’ to meet high standards of material security. Many people, however, felt outraged by Ma Nuo’s assertiveness and saw in it a measure of how consumer society had spoilt young people, turning them into ‘uncivil individualists’ (Yan 2011) who lack true feelings and principles. While they professed their readiness to provide support to their future families in virtue of their sense of responsibility, the young men I interviewed could not consider what Ma Nuo exacted as ‘family support’. At the same time, they were aware that their chances of making a good marriage depended on their ability to embody the successful post-­Mao man: a reliable breadwinner with a house, a car and a good job. Jason found it necessary to look back to a time in which modernity, love and conjugality were construed by the state as opposed to wealth and commercial exchange; this, however, was an ideal that he could not recover for himself. From the comments of Mr Qian, Maoist marriage emerged as a less romantic affair: the unhappy match arranged by his Army superior appeared as a burden of the collective past (Rofel 2007). Mr Wu, on the other hand, regretted the closing of his factory after the end of Maoism, and saw in it the origin of all his troubles. Ironically, the two men’s ideas of marriage were similar; for both, marriage had to be based on personal preference and also follow ‘Chinese tradition’. Accordingly, none of my informants told me that they would marry against their parents’ wishes. As much as marriage is assumed to be a matter of negotiation between families and generations, ‘freedom of choice’ in marriage indicates the opportunity to ‘look around’ and, most importantly, to refuse an undesirable partner. Post-­Mao ideas of romantic love are recast in terms of responsibility and, coupled with the imperative of intergenerational support, reinforce the model of the heteronormative middle-­class family. The anxiety experienced by unmarried young men exposes the absence of alternative models of manhood in post-­Mao China; accordingly, marriage remains the only socially viable path to adulthood. In the eyes of many young bachelors, competition and consumption constitute moments in which they are called upon by state and market institutions to take responsibility for themselves and for their families’ economic, social and moral wellbeing. In this respect, what may appear as spaces for individual expression become social imperatives, as well as moments of individuation that eventually re-­embed the social actor in class society via family responsibility (Rose 1999; Zhang and Ong 2008). As will be further explored in the next chapter, the centrality of the family in the discursive practices of ‘Chinese tradition’ emerges as the one specificity that makes Chinese marriage both modern and specifically Chinese (Anagnost 1997, p. 85) This discourse ties in with the Chinese state’s effort to propose a believable model of social cohesion and stability (Shue 2004) at a time when social inequality is largely perceived as lack of social justice. In this context, the collective, the familial and the individual need to be rhetorically reconciled in order to provide the foundations of an ideal modernity in which all, winners and losers, might recognize themselves.

40   Roberta Zavoretti

Notes 1 This article has drawn heavily upon material from Zavoretti, R. 2016, ‘Is It Better to Cry in a BMW or to Laugh on a Bicycle? Marriage, “Financial Performance Anxiety” and the Production of Class in Nanjing (PRC)’, Modern Asian Studies Special Issue 4 (50), published by Cambridge University Press and reproduced with permission. 2 The government department that oversees Jiangsu Radio and Television is the Jiangsu Province Radio, Film and Television Bureau, the Jiangsu-­based sub-­unit of the State Press, Publication, Radio and Television Bureau (Li 1991; Tong 2010; Weber 2002; Zhong 2010). 3 Ma Nuo was born in 1988 according to the website http://ent.56.com/sp/manuodq. 4 Unmarried young people may experience pre-­marital sex, yet they hide their intimate relationships from their parents (Fang 2013). 5 The Maoist ideal of companionate marriage did not deny the importance of sexual fulfilment but cast it as less important than other aspects of conjugality and subsumed it under social and collective aims (Evans, 1997, p. 98, 2002). 6 The 2011 amendment changed the provisions for dealing with property in cases of divorce. According to the amended law, property bought by each spouse (or their parents) before the marriage may stay with the original owner in the event of divorce. Before the amendment, property bought by each spouse or the parents before marriage became the common property of the two spouses upon marriage and had to be equally divided in the event of divorce. 7 In Chinese, the word xiang means ‘to evaluate’, but also indicates mutuality; qin indicates a family relation but is also used to signify closeness and intimacy. 8 This is despite the fact that they were both in their late twenties/early thirties. 9 While Mr Qian related his son’s single status to the young man’s desire to enjoy himself, gainfully employed bachelors experience fierce social pressure and gossip.

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Better to cry in a BMW or laugh on a bicycle?   41 Gottschang, Suzanne. 2001. ‘The Consuming Mother: Infant Feeding and the Feminine Body in Urban China’. In: China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture, edited by Nancy N. Chen, Constance D. Clark, Suzanne Z. Gottschang, and Lyn Jeffrey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 89–103. Greenhalgh, Susan. 2010. Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenhalgh Susan. 2012. ‘Patriarchal Demographics? China’s Sex Ratio Reconsidered’. Population and Development Review 38: 130–149. Han, Hua. 2009. ‘Living a Single Life: The Plight and Adaptation of the Bachelors in Yishala’. In: Chinese Kinship. Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Susanne Brandtstädter and Gonçalo D. Santos. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 48–66. Ku, Hok Bun. 2003. Moral Politics in a South Chinese Village: Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Resistance. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Latham, Kevin. 2000. ‘Nothing But the Truth: News Media, Power and Hegemony in South China’. The China Quarterly 163: 633–654. Lavely, William. 1991. ‘Marriage and Mobility Under Rural Collectivism’. In: Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society, edited by Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 286–312. Li, Xiaoping. 1991. ‘The Chinese Television System and Television News’. The China Quarterly 126: 340–355. Lin, Qi. 2010. ‘The Dating Game by Jiangsu TV’. China Daily, 24 April. Liu, Xin. 2009. The Mirage of China: Anti-­Humanism, Narcissism, And Corporeality of the Contemporary World. New York: Berghahn. Ocko, Jonathan K. 1991. ‘Women, Property and Law in the People’s Republic of China’. In: Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society edited by Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 313–346. Palmer, Michael. 1995. ‘The Re-­emergence of Family Law in post-­Mao China: Marriage, Divorce and Reproduction’. The China Quarterly 141: 110–134. Palmer, Michael. 2007. ‘Transforming Family Law in Post-­Deng China: Marriage, Divorce and Reproduction’. The China Quarterly 191: 675–695. Rofel, Lisa. 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.  Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shue, Vivienne. 2004. ‘Legitimacy Crisis in China?’. In: State and Society in 21st Century China, edited Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen. New York: Routledge, pp. 24–49. Siu, Helen. 1993. ‘Reconstituting Dowry and Brideprice in South China’. In: Chinese Families in the Post-­Mao Era, edited by Deborah Davis and Stevan Harrell. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 165–188. Stafford, Charles. 2000. Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sun, Wanning. 2018. ‘Soft Power by Accident or by Design: If You Are the One and Chinese Television’. In: Screening China’s Soft Power, edited by Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen. London: Routledge, pp. 196–211. Tong, Jingrong. 2010. ‘The Crisis of the Centralized Media Control Theory: How Local Power Controls Media in China’. Media Culture and Society 32 (6): 925–942. 

42   Roberta Zavoretti Watson, Rubie S. 1991. ‘Afterword: Marriage and Gender Inequality’. In: Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society, edited by Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Weber, Ian. 2002. ‘Reconfiguring Chinese Propaganda and Control Modalities: A Case Study of Shanghai’s Television System’. Journal of Contemporary China 11 (30): 53–75. Whyte, Martin King. 1990. ‘Changes in Mate Choices in Chengdu’. In: Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen: The Impact of Reform, edited by Deborah Davis and Ezra F. Vogel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 181–214. Whyte, Martin King. 1993. ‘Wedding Behaviour and Family Strategy in Chengdu’. In: Chinese Families in the Post-­Mao Era, edited by Deborah Davis and Stevan Harrell. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 189–217. Wolf, Margery. 1985. Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China. London: Methuen and Co. Wong, Edward. 2012. ‘China TV Grows Racy, and Gets a Chaperon’. New York Times, 1 January. Wu, Mian. 2010. ‘No BMW, No Marriage for Money-­Grubbing Young Chinese’. Global Times, 4 May. Yan, Yunxiang. 2011. ‘The Individualization of the Family in Rural China’. Boundary 2 38 (1): 203–209. Yang, Xiyun. 2010. ‘China’s Censors Rein in “Vulgar” Reality TV Show’. New York Times, 18 July. Zhang, Li. 2010. In Search of Paradise: Middle-­class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.  Zhang, Li and Ong, Aihwa. 2008. ‘Introduction: Powers of the Self, Socialism from Afar’. In: Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar, edited by Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 1–19. Zhong, Yong. 2010. ‘Relations between Chinese Television and the Capital Market: Three Case Studies’. Media Culture and Society 32 (4): 649–668. 

3 Successology for women Relationship experts and sociobiological discourses Haiping Liu

Introduction On a chilly morning in January 2016, I found myself sitting in a 200-square-­ metre banquet hall at the Holiday Inn, in the city centre of Guangzhou, among over 100 women and a dozen men (see Figure 3.1). We were attending the ‘love storm workshop’ (aiqing fengbao) in order to learn how to solve relationship problems and improve our ability to love. After seven hours of intense training, the lecturer, a middle-­aged expert shining with his gold watch and bling-­bling belt buckle, concluded with an encouraging smile: You must have a strong self and a strong heart so as to know what you want. Love and marriage are all about choice. If you commit all your emotion to one man, you definitely would feel insecure. But what if you have three potential boyfriends to choose from? A young woman seated near me answered with confidence: ‘I feel well-­placed to win (shengquanzaiwo)!’. Behind this scene lies a phenomenal rise in the number of self-­proclaimed relationship experts in mainland China over the last two decades. Accredited or not, these relationship experts’ self-­help books, offering advice on intimate romantic relationships, are purchased by millions of readers, especially women. Whole sections of bookstores are devoted to sub-­categories: sexual psychology, intimate romantic relationships, marriage management and so on. Apart from publishing bestsellers, relationship experts are frequently invited onto dating shows as guest consultants. Many also organize workshops for their enthusiastic fans. Utilizing a dichotomized and essentialist gender rhetoric, relationship experts normally describe the two sexes as naturally different, and romantic relationships as a war zone in which expert advice is necessary for readers to arm themselves with survival tactics. Followed by millions of users on social media platforms such as Sina Weibo and WeChat public accounts, relationship experts have become an important source from which young women seek advice and help in making decisions and choices for their intimate romantic relationships. Following Roberta Zavoretti’s discussion in Chapter 2, which focused on men,

44   Haiping Liu

Figure 3.1 Love storm workshop, 17 January 2016. Source: Photograph by the author.

this chapter considers the challenges faced by single women; it takes the form of a critical and feminist study of relationship experts’ sociobiologically based self-­ help books and explores the historical determinants of these books’ (ab)use of science. I am particularly concerned with the question of why relationship experts have been able to achieve such significant success in China at this particular time. I interpret this success as telling us something about Chinese women’s anxiety, feelings of crisis and search for meaning. Most readers of these relationship experts are women born after China’s 1979 one-­child policy. For these women, who are now in their late twenties and thirties, marriage remains a normative goal even in urban China. Parents avidly participate in matchmaking on behalf of their children in the parks of Chinese cities (Sun 2012). Meanwhile, a proliferation of matchmaking and dating websites and smartphone applications have boomed in the market, and has become a growing business. In analyzing Chinese demographic trajectories, sociologist Deborah Davies (2014, p. 564) finds that ‘In China, while individuals are ever more likely to divorce, high rates of marriage and remarriage indicate that marriage as an institution remains normatively robust’. Leta Hong Fincher (2014, p. 3), author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, traces the derogatory term ‘leftover woman’ (shengnü), which is widely used to

Successology for women   45 describe an urban, professional female in her late twenties or older who is still single. According to Fincher, since China’s Ministry of Education added the term shengnü to its official lexicon in 2007, Chinese state media have aggressively promoted the term through articles, surveys, cartoons and editorials, stigmatizing educated women who are still single, often referring to the ‘crisis’ of the growing number of educated women who ‘cannot find a husband’. The pressure to marry before their late twenties and maintain marriage status is particularly felt by women. As my informant Jing (29 years old) said, the pressure of marriage can begin as early as a woman’s early twenties, around the time she finishes her undergraduate education. The pressure reaches a climax as she approaches her mid-­twenties, known as ‘the golden reproductive age’ (huangjin shengyu nianling). Why does marriage still have such a tenacious grip on women in urban China? First, marriage in China has always been understood as a rite of passage to adulthood and, more significantly, a rite of passage to womanhood and motherhood for women. Unmarried women are still deemed incomplete (buwanzheng) despite—if not exactly because of—their professional and career achievements. This cultural belief dominates mainstream ideology to the extent that marriage functions as one of the most important—if not the only—standard used to evaluate a woman’s psychological, biological and moral maturity. Second, marriage is a metonym for belonging, not simply to Chinese culture but to one’s own family. In Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, Lisa Rofel (2007, p. 100) reminds us that ‘In China, the ongoing discursive productions of the family are indispensable sites for establishing one’s humanness as well as one’s social subjectivity’. For single women to establish their normality as women, they must marry and be ‘proper’ wives and mothers. Third, monogamous heterosexual marriage has been naturalized as the only legitimate form of adult existence, leaving alternatives to a woman’s fulfilment outside the subject positions of wife and mother unimaginable or not respected. In addition, dominant discourse prioritizes marriage as ‘the site and pivot of all sexual activity and experience’, leaving no discursive space for women to choose difference, whether this means practising a same-­sex relationship, having casual sex, choosing single motherhood or remaining single (Evans 1997, p.  212). It is within this pro-­marriage and pro-­childbearing context that relationship experts are able to flourish in China. However, finding Mr Right and living happily ever after is never easy. The economic reform since the 1970s and institutional restructuring after 1990 have led to what Deborah Davis calls the ‘privatization’ of marriage in post-­socialist China. Davis describes this as ‘a process that follows from the state’s redefinition of marriage as a voluntary contractual relationship grounded in individual emotional satisfaction’ (2014, p.  554). On the one hand, the Marriage Law of 1950 renders spouse selection—previously the business of matchmakers and parents—a matter of personal choice for marriageable men and women themselves. However, hypergamy, or ‘marrying up’, still remains the norm: women are encouraged, if not pressured, to find a husband in a family of higher social

46   Haiping Liu status or greater wealth. This norm of hypergamy creates anxieties and tensions that are exacerbated by high expectations of educational and professional success for single women (Zhang and Sun 2014). On the other hand, rapid privatization of urban housing stock and skyrocketing house prices since 2000 have made owning a house before marriage almost impossible for the younger generation without parental investment (Davis 2014). But owning a house is still regarded as a necessary condition for young couples planning to get married. Given these new social, economic and cultural changes, women in urban China would have, borrowing Anthony Giddens’ (1991) words, to be ‘mobile, unsettled, and open’ in their behaviour and feelings about sexuality and love. They must navigate precariously through an ‘unexplored territory to be charted’, a territory that is fraught with ‘new dangers’ (Giddens 1991, pp. 12–13). It is these palpable anxieties that give rise to a demand for various forms of guidance in negotiating private lives and intimate romantic relationships. In this chapter, I focus on the ‘guidance’ offered by one relationship expert, Yang Bingyang, also known as Ayawawa (hereafter referred to as Yang), who has been extremely popular in promoting sociobiological arguments for almost a decade (Yang 2009, 2011, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2015d). Although Yang has over three million fans on Sina Weibo and 1.3 million followers on WeChat, she has been consistently criticized by Chinese grassroots feminist activists for commodifying women. Taking advantage of the controversy, Yang attracts enormous attention with her intentionally sensational opinions. However, on 21 May 2018, an article titled ‘Relationship Guru Ayawawa and 3 million Kinds of Mating Anxieties’ put an end to Yang’s popularity. According to the article, Yang asked girls during her marriage workshops to imagine the comfort women1 during the Japanese invasion of China. She asked these young women in their twenties: ‘Do you think the comfort women were miserable?’. She continued: ‘But have you ever considered that the men might have been worse-­off? They were shot dead, but the women at least survived.’ Yang drew the following conclusion: ‘So even in war times, women still have a gender privilege. As long as you can take advantage of your gender privilege, you will have endless benefits’ (Ge 2018). This short paragraph earned Yang a barrage of criticism and a six-­month ban from posting on Sina Weibo. For the first time, China Women’s News, an affiliate of the state-­backed All-­China Women’s Federation, dismissed Yang’s gender ideas as ‘heretical’. Although Yang was banned because she had invoked a taboo topic—comfort women during the Japanese invasion—her influence remains prevalent and will linger well into the foreseeable future. The counselling company she founded is still operating, and other relationship experts who preach sociobiological ideas are still running their businesses. This chapter is concerned with several questions—both theoretical and empirical—that the relationship experts boom has raised: How might we understand and analyze the rise of relationship experts and their sociobiological discourse in China at this particular time? How does relationship experts’ love and marriage advice dovetail with the state’s marriage and eugenics campaigns? How do relationship experts draw from sociobiology and merge its ideas with the cultural

Successology for women   47 matrix of the market? In other words, how do these experts come to orient the (female) self, provide it with strategies for action and, perhaps more crucially, shape new subjectivities in intimate romantic relationships?

Research methods Drawing on my extensive participatory observation and a dozen interviews with consultants working in Yang’s relationship counselling company, I follow an interdisciplinary methodology that combines ethnographic accounts with a critical analysis of the content of the relationship expert’s books. I use textual analysis to examine the connections between relationship experts’ sociobiological discourses and academic versions of this scientific discipline in order to drill down to the micro-­level of Yang’s appropriation of sociobiology. While textual analysis of Yang’s books cannot reveal details of their readership and reception, I conduct a close reading of the interactions between the readers and Yang in the daily push messages (2015–2016) in Yang’s WeChat public account and observe the discussions in one of Yang’s fan’s WeChat group, ‘Wawa fans sisterhood club (Guangdong)’, to get an idea of how her actual readers understand, interpret and embody Yang’s relationship advice in their romantic relationships. In doing so, I attempt neither to homogenize Yang’s readers, nor to smooth out the diversity, complexity and resistance in the sociobiological discourses. My aim is to gain an understanding of the ways in which fear, hope and anxiety are entangled within a set of practices of self-­measurement, self-­surveillance and self-­help endorsed by the individual readers who read and follow the relationship expert Yang. During my fieldwork in Guangzhou, I attended a relationship consultant training programme and served as an intern consultant from October to November 2016 in Company F, founded by Yang and another relationship expert. Based on my connections at the company and through the snowballing method, I conducted 16 semi-­structured, open-­ended interviews with eight senior relationship consultants and eight intern consultants (five men and 11 women, aged between 22 and 45). I also held interviews with six of Yang’s readers in Hong Kong and Guangzhou in 2015 and 2016. The majority of the interviews lasted from half an hour to two hours each, and they were mostly audio-­recorded and subsequently transcribed. In this chapter, I choose to rely on qualitative materials—narratives and accounts provided by my informants—to access the consultants’ and readers’ points of view.

What’s sociobiology got to do with it? Yang’s husband-­hunting manual stands out from books by other relationship experts because of her lavish references and allusions to science, specifically sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Yang openly espouses the view that a woman’s success and happiness is predominately defined by her seeking and securing a husband who has strong potential for parental investment. The following is one example of Yang’s sociobiological argument:

48   Haiping Liu According to evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss, our emotional mechanism inevitably drives us towards the maximization of our reproduction interests, thus, in everybody’s heart, there is a calculator based on our instincts. It measures whether our present partner brings the maximum reproductive bonus to us. If not, we will turn to others. (Yang 2015b, p. 270, translated by the chapter author, emphasis added) What we see here is an interesting mix. Yang starts by quoting a science expert, then offers an interpretation of current social life and reads this back into a speculative prehistory, finally ending with a strategy for action legitimated by the authority of science. Drawing on sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Yang actually transforms these descriptive hypotheses into prescriptive guidance for husband hunting. What Yang fundamentally does is to revive something very old, adding to it a new twist, in this case justifying the conventional norm of marriage and the sexual division of labour by calling on scientific ‘truth’ and ‘evolution’ under the guise of explanation and advice. The discipline of sociobiology contends that human and animal social behaviours are largely written in their genetic codes. The field became a major area of academic inquiry in 1975 with the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s influential book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. By developing sociobiology into an influential field, Wilson endeavoured to reformulate the disciplines of anthropology, psychology and sociology in terms of biology, to ‘biologicize’ them, as he put it. At the same time, sociobiological research of humans gained wide popular credibility. Books such as The Naked Ape, The Selfish Gene and The Evolution of Desire reached a very large public. This sociobiology boom was criticized by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins as ‘a vicious cycle’ that we seem to have become caught up in, which involves ‘alternately applying the model of capitalist society to the animal kingdom, then reapplying this bourgeoisified animal kingdom to the interpretation of human society’ (1976, p. 101). The sociologist Raewyn Connell attributes the popularity of sociobiological arguments to the fact that sociobiology can be used in a mirror construction, reflecting back what is familiar as ‘science’, justifying what many readers wish to believe with ‘a touch of salacious humour’ (2012, p. 69). In a similar vein, the instant acclaim with which Yang’s sociobiological arguments have been received over the past two decades is due not only to the fact that they fill an obvious gap in scientific research and education about dating and marriage in Chinese public discourse but, more importantly, because they provide an explanatory framework for existing dating and matrimonial practices in China. The explanation and defence of the status quo contained within Yang’s writings, offers, in Anne Fausto-­ Sterling’s words, ‘a certain psychological and political sense of well-­being’ (1985, p. 175). Equally important, Yang’s sociobiological claims imply an entrenched view of women as reproductive machines and marriage as a market. In analyzing this market, in which men are the buyers and women are both the sellers and commodities, Yang writes: ‘In terms of mating, the whole society is bound to be a

Successology for women   49 buyer’s market dominated by men.… Regarding the competition between the buyers, whoever pays the highest price gets the best commodity to carry on his genes’ (2015a, p. 247). Under Yang’s pen, a woman’s body is metaphorized into an instrument for reproduction, and more crucially, becomes the commodity for sale in the marriage market. Rather than being Yang’s own invention, the themes of machines and markets are deeply rooted in the concepts of capitalist life science that recur in the work of Edward O. Wilson (1975) and his many peers. As Donna Haraway (1991) acutely noted, sociobiology is science with a logic of control appropriate to the historical conditions of post-­Second World War capitalism. Having been affected by the technical and theoretical transformations during 1960s USA, sociobiologists developed a set of ‘complex stable configurations and stable evolutionary strategies’ (Haraway 1991, p. 58) that were essential to the realization of profit in immensely complex economic and political circumstances in crisis-­ridden Amer­ican society. In other words, sociobiology has always constructed the body and community as capitalist and patriarchal machines and markets: the machine for production, the market for exchange, and both machine and market for reproduction. Yang’s sociobiological arguments were timely, resonating with the logic of control appropriate to the historical conditions of post-­socialist China. The sociobiological rationality of maximizing one’s genetic profit and reproductive interest through careful mate selection, embedded in Yang’s pro-­marriage and pro-­childbearing manuals, dovetails with the Chinese government’s determination to ameliorate the ‘bare branches’ problem2 caused by the sex ratio imbalance on the one hand, and its eugenics campaign which shifts from coercive one-­child policy to boosting fertility to cope with its ageing population on the other. In 2004, Li Weixiong, vice-­chairman of the Population, Resources and Environment Committee of China, predicted that males of marriageable age would outnumber females by 30 million by 2020. He further warned: ‘Such serious gender disproportion poses a major threat to the healthy, harmonious and sustainable growth of the nation’s population and could trigger such crimes and social problems as mercenary marriage, abduction of women and prostitution’ (Xinhua News Agency 2004). Clearly, to decrease the number of unmarried men and prevent subsequent social problems, women of marriageable age must be mobilized to become wives for the ‘bare branches’. Population specialist Susan Greenhalgh elaborates on the role of eugenics in China’s population planning policy in her book Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China: The eugenics campaign—yousheng youyu, literally ‘superior birth and child rearing’—incorporated genetic engineering. However, the campaign was much broader than that, reflecting the view that humans are shaped by a broad array of genetic, environmental and educational factors, most of which can be nurtured so that human potential can be molded to meet the nation’s needs. (Greenhalgh 2010, p. 58)

50   Haiping Liu What better way to improve the quality of the population for the nation’s good than the relationship experts’ sociobiological advice, which aims to convince women to seek the ‘maximization of their reproduction interests’ in accordance with their own ‘evolutionary instincts’ for the private good? Many relationship experts, including Yang, support the institution of marriage and motherhood. In order to compel her readers to choose childbearing, Yang even conjures up grisly images: ‘Reproduction is a tailor-­made death’s door (guimenguan) for women. If you make it through, you can be a human being again, otherwise, you can only be ghosts’ (2015a, p. 176). In order to mobilize women to be marriage- and children-­minded, nothing works better than the relationship experts’ seemingly depoliticized persuasion in the name of self-­help. These sociobiological discourses receive tacit approval from the Chinese government, which adopts a laissez-­faire approach towards the pro-­ marriage relationship experts. By contrast, feminist voices suffer severe censorship and political suppression. This contrast exposes an ugly truth: the marriage between evolutionary sciences and market calculations is geared to the production of well-­behaved wives and mothers for the private home and the Party-­state.

The abuse of science: from quantification to commodification With the rise of the popular press and the internet over the last two decades, individuals are increasingly accustomed to seeking information and advice from self-­ help books and online platforms. Having grown up during the information age, the post-­80s and post-­90s generations have learned to access and process expert advice as an integral part of their self-­management activities and, in doing so, they learn to make decisions and choices for their private lives and relationships. The majority of Chinese women born after 1979 have no siblings to compete with, and therefore receive greater financial investment and educational resources.3 For these educated women living in urban China, the freedom to enjoy romantic relationships comes hand in hand with an increased level of anxiety, risk and frustration. These women have been trained well enough to understand and sometimes fall for experts’ quasi-­scientific advice, yet not well enough to critically reflect on the experts’ arguments. In examining relationship experts that give advice on television and radio, Wanning Sun and Wei Lei have found that Chinese audiences defer to experts and are used to a didactic mode of address: No advice program is respectable and authoritative unless it is armed with emotional experts, accredited psychologists, legal specialists, and relationship counsellors.… Protagonists, without exception, defer to the experts— even though some panelists dish out very harsh-­sounding and didactic advice—and even when the outcome is not a happy one. (Sun and Lei 2016, p. 14) This obsession with experts applies to other forms of advice media as well. In relationship self-­help books the role of the ‘expert’, whether self-­claimed or

Successology for women   51 institutionally accredited, is central and indisputable. Senior consultant Zhong justified this top-­down style as necessary, since the post-­80s and post-­90s generations, especially women with less experience in relationships, have blind faith in experts and are used to a seemingly scientific explanation. However, Yang takes the scientific approach to a new extreme. After establishing ‘mate value’ (MV) and ‘paternal uncertainty’ (PU) as the two most important indicators of a woman’s attractiveness and marriageability, Yang designs several tests readers can use to measure their MV and PU. Readers are reminded from time to time that: ‘Only by measuring your mate value accurately, can you make the optimal choice. If you overestimate your MV, you will be a leftover woman; if you underestimate your MV, you will marry down’ (Yang 2015b, p. 102). Readers are required to provide certain basic information when asking questions on Yang’s WeChat public account. This includes giving the eight indicators of women’s MV according to Yang, i.e. age, height, breast cup size, weight, facial attractiveness self-­grading, educational background, personality and family background (only child and urbanite or not). Fans have often complained about the facial attractiveness self-­grading measure (yanzhi ziping) for its lack of objectivity. In response, Yang asks the women to submit photos together with questions so that Yang can herself grade the fans’ facial attractiveness ‘scientifically’. Zhi, the second character in the Chinese word yanzhi, had dual meanings of both ‘score’ and ‘value’. The practice of scoring a woman’s facial attractiveness and evaluating her based on that score therefore has two implications. First, a woman’s MV, ‘the sum of traits that are perceived as desirable,’ is replaced by facial attractiveness and evaluated by one hegemonic standard. Second, scoring, which was originally a means to make attractiveness quantifiable, now has become an end in itself. By making available a quasi-­scientific lexicon of mating, Yang implies the existence of a standardized cure-­all remedy for problems in intimate romantic relationships. The terms MV and PU have been so frequently used in the WeChat public account’s daily Q&A that they have become Yang’s ultimate panacea for all relationship problems: ‘You need to improve your MV and lower your PU’. This sentence appears in almost every solution Yang offers to her readers’ relationship problems, ranging from ‘why doesn’t he want to marry me?’ to ‘how to defeat the mistress (xiaosan)’, ‘how to win back my ex-­ boyfriend’ and ‘how to make a good impression on the parents-­in-law’ (Yang 2015c, pp. 318–331). Yang’s application transforms sociobiological jargon into user-­friendly buzzwords which have a scientific aura. Ripped from their original research context, the scientific terms are applied to explain fans’ relationship problems in a much more accessible manner. Yang’s scientific aura is reinforced by the various formulas, diagrams and tests in her books. In addition to the MV and PU self-­tests, Yang recommends a series of tests women should use to evaluate their partners. This passion for quantifying romantic relationships into what political economist William Davies (2015, p. 6) refers to as ‘a measurable, visible, improvable entity’ is, in a sense, similar to the current science of happiness and the entire happiness industry. The

52   Haiping Liu popularity of these pseudo-­scientific tools is supported by people’s belief in ‘a scientific utopia’ in which all problems of morality and politics will be solvable given an adequate science of human feelings (Davies 2015, p. 6). Yang’s quantification measures and scientific language carefully feed into her readers’ belief that all the problems of romantic relationships can be solved by an adequate rationalization of emotions. One senior consultant who has dealt with many of Yang’s hardcore fans in the counselling services explained it to me in this way: Yang is a life-­saver for many women. She is the only expert who analyzes intimate relationships and emotions so pointedly, rationally and scientifically. What she says applies to a lot of people, thus her fans believe in her, imitate her and want to be more like her, a successful wife and mother. Yang’s hardcore fans have firmly held on to the belief that a perfect and happy relationship can be achieved by quantifying their attractiveness and rationalizing their emotions. However, this belief also transforms intimate romantic relationships and emotions into what Eva Illouz (2008, p. 139) describes as ‘measurable and calculable objects, to be captured in quantitative statements with a deeper refinement of techniques of calculation’. One of Yang’s former fans who is now a consultant in Company F laments that the only thing missing in Yang’s theory about love is love itself: ‘Yang is very good at analyzing the male and female relationship, but she didn’t take into account that couples have feelings and love for each other’. In her seminal study of western marital therapy, sociologist Eva Illouz points out that: ‘The fact that we increasingly have techniques to standardize intimate relationships, to talk about them and manage them in a generalized way, weakens the capacity for closeness, the congruence between subjects and object, and the possibility of fusion’ (2008, p.  149). Similarly, in Yang’s relationship management system, numerical methods are used to quantify attractiveness and relationships. Improving MV and lowering PU become akin to adding and subtracting on a numerical scale. Numbers are metaphors for the belief that emotions and relationships can be calculated and solved with mathematic scrutiny.

Emotion work in relationship management In addition to MV improvement, another core component of Yang’s panacea is ‘keeping your PU always low’. This concept of PU derives from an evolutionary psychological context. According to David M. Buss (2007, pp. 60–61), paternal uncertainty is an adaptive problem that males face because they can never ‘know’ with complete certainty whether they are the genetic father of their mate’s offspring. Based on two sets of studies—one of sexual jealousy and a second of mate preferences for cues to paternity—Buss hypothesizes that men have evolved solutions to the problem of paternity uncertainty: the desire for women’s chastity and sexual fidelity, and abhorrence of promiscuity in a long-­ term mate (Buss and Schmitt 1993, p. 216). However, it is no secret that modern

Successology for women   53 Chinese dating is not chaste at all. The sociologist James Farrer (2002) has found that an increasing number of men and women in China now engage in sex before marriage, creating a new youth sex culture based on romance, leisure and free choice. In addition, high levels of geographical mobility have complicated the marriage market in Chinese cities, weakening the social norms that previously constrained premarital and extramarital sexual relationships (Shen 2008). Acutely aware of these new sexual orders, Yang urges women to present a faithful, submissive and never-­sleeps-around persona so that their partners can feel certain about their paternity. In this way Yang reworks the sociobiological hypothesis into a concrete man-­manoeuvring trick. But why does a woman have to keep her PU low if its only function is to reassure a man about his paternity? To put this question slightly differently, why should a woman worry about pleasing her partner in a manner that is unlikely to be reciprocal? The answer to this question begins and ends with Yang’s ‘optimal’ family model, which translates economic inequalities in the public arena into private terms. Yang is fully aware of the gap between the unequal resources available to men and women. She writes: ‘Seen from most … societies, women get lower pay and [have a] lower position than men, yet they work longer hours doing housework, and [have] fewer chances for promotion’ (Yang 2015b, p.  86). However feminist it may sound, Yang’s solution to the bleak reality of economic inequality is for a woman to get a man’s love and money by improving her MV and lowering her PU, thereby luring him into marriage. In marriage, Yang argues, the husband should be the provider while, in exchange, women should offer reproductive, aesthetic and emotional value, of which the last is the most amenable to improvement through the lowering of one’s PU. I interrogate Yang’s concept of emotional value in light of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s concept of ‘emotion work’. Hochschild differentiates emotional control at work from its equivalent at home by referring to the latter as emotion work or emotion management: ‘those emotional managements done in a private context where they have use value’ (2003, p.  7). Hochschild finds that in the Amer­ican middle class, women tend to manage feelings more because, in general, they depend on men for money, and one of the various ways of repaying their debt is to do extra emotion work—especially emotion work that affirms, enhances and celebrates the well-­being and status of others (2003, p.  165). Behind Yang’s optimal family model, that the man is the provider while the woman gives back emotional and reproductive value, is what Leta Hong Fincher (2014, p. 25) calls ‘the resurgence of gender inequality’. This model represents a return of the discourse of ‘men leading the outer domain and women leading the inner domain’ (nanzhuwai nüzhunei) and the ideal that women ‘take care of the husband and nurture the children’ at home (xiangfu jiaozi). These discourses, which were largely rejected during the Maoist era, resurfaced in the reform era and have achieved broad ideological purchase in urban China within the last two decades. The ‘virtuous wife and good mother’ (xianqi liangmu), promoted by many Party mouthpieces, must be considerate, caring and nice. The ‘virtuous wife and

54   Haiping Liu good mother’ is similar to Yang’s ideal woman with a low PU, who is ‘gentle, considerate, and sweet’ and can always ‘express her admiration and appreciation constantly to her partner, giving him positive recognition’ (Yang 2015b, p. 174). The only distinction between the ‘virtuous wife and good mother’ and Yang’s ideal woman is that the former is part of the government’s campaign to build a harmonious family, the smallest unit of a harmonious society, while the latter is a relationship expert’s advice to the individual woman to secure her husband for her own good. What makes readers enthusiastically welcome Yang’s advice is the practical guidance she provides. Aware of women’s need to present a low PU, Yang uses the analogy of magicians and hypnotists to emphasize that good emotion management demands enormous rehearsal time and practice. Given that ‘securing a man is already not easy, while securing a successful man is harder’, Yang urges her readers to ‘learn the tricks and gimmicks one by one’ (2015a, p. 236). One important trick Yang frequently teaches is to say nasty things in a soft way (shuoruanhua). That is, women should express their thoughts in a ‘nicer’ way so that their partners will accept their comments. These conversational tricks, Yang suggests, can attract a woman’s partner towards her so that his happiness and sadness come to depend on her and all his actions are within her control. Hochschild describes such tricks as ‘the talk of the artful prey, the language of tips on how to make him want her, how to psyche him out, how to turn him on or turn him off ’ (2003, p. 167). According to Yang, women can achieve more and better material rewards by doing emotion work, because ‘the controlling one is the beneficiary, while the controlled is the payer’ (2015b, p. 174). Put explicitly, lowering one’s PU is the means to achieving the desired end of secretly controlling the man and his money. The reason Yang is able to convince so many women with her pseudo-­scientific concepts is that she is sending a hidden message that women can actually be more powerful than men by adopting an apparently submissive persona. But what else does it take to achieve this persona? In criticizing women’s emotion work at home, Hochschild cites the concept of ‘shadow labour’. She points out that, like housework, emotion work involves unseen effort: [They both] do not quite count as labour but [are] nevertheless crucial to getting other things done. As with doing housework well, the trick is to erase any evidence of effort, to offer only the clean house and the welcoming smile. (2003, p. 167) In a similar vein, Yang also demands that her readers’ emotion work should be as undetectable and effortless as shadow labour. The fake authenticity of emotion work, paradoxical as it may seem, should be achieved sometimes through self-­deception: You must whole-­heartedly like, appreciate and appraise your partner from the bottom of your heart so that you can admire him and love him. Only

Successology for women   55 when you can do this will men trust you, be certain about your offspring and stay with you. (Yang 2015b, p. 129) This performativity of emotion work is succinctly described by Hochschild: ‘Being becomes a way of doing. Acting is the needed art, and emotion work is the tool’ (2003, p. 167). The ideal subject of emotion work must be constantly other-­oriented, which produces a false self that is split from the true self. The performativity involved in presenting a low PU through emotion work thus shapes new subjectivities for intimate romantic relationships. The wider economic inequality between women and men is filtered into the intimate daily exchanges between wife and husband. The transactions Yang advocates between the husband’s provider value and the wife’s emotional value go on morning, noon and night in intimate romantic relationships and marriage. In this model marriage both bridges and obscures the gap between the economically unequal parties. It ties the emotion worker to her ‘boss’ so closely that the wife (the emotion worker) cannot afford to leave her cheating husband (boss) since, as Yang (2015b, p. 324) writes, ‘if the marriage is broken, the woman will lose her source of livelihood and may even lose the man’s parental investment in his children if she has a high PU’. The unconditional tolerance of men’s cheating that Yang prescribes here is actually a result of women’s financial dependence on their partners. Through a chain of low PU and emotion work, Yang creates a self-­contained loop from which her readers cannot escape.

Twisted female successology in neoliberal China In the opening pages of A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey (2007, p. 3) points out that: ‘Neoliberalism has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-­sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world.’ Since 1978, China has gradually shifted from a centralized economy to an economy based on market mechanisms. This has inevitably transformed the subject of national deployment from the masses—‘the people’—to the entrepreneurial individual (Davies 2010, p.  193). Along with this ideological transformation, an entire industry of ‘successology’ (chenggongxue), mostly based on entrepreneurs, has flourished since the 1980s in the form of books, courses, magazines, radio and television shows and other cultural products. According to the anthropologist David J. Davies (2010, pp. 193–194), ‘successful personages’ (chenggong renshi) have become the new exemplars under market conditions. Successology books have been purchased by a huge mass of readers who are searching for ways to cope with the increased anxieties created by changes in the market and who need to equip themselves with new skills. Although entrepreneurial successology does not explicitly cater to women, the ‘self-­making’ rhetoric with which these products are imbued has penetrated what I call ‘twisted female successology’. Linking the promise of success to a

56   Haiping Liu woman’s ability to re-­make herself, Yang’s debut book, Relationship Thick Black Theory (2009), embeds her sociobiological arguments within an (in) famous antecedent of Chinese successology, that of ‘thick black theory’ (houheixue). First mooted in 1911 by Li Zongwu, a politician and scholar born at the end of the Qing dynasty, thick black theory literally means ‘thick face and black heart’. This was later developed into a set of skills designed to shamelessly and cruelly manipulate one’s enemies in order to achieve success. A strong genre of successology in recent decades, thick black theory is still relevant today when, more than ever, the Chinese view the marketplace as a battlefield (Chu 1994). One of my interviewees, Lilian, explained to me: ‘Men’s battlefield is the outside world, while women’s battlefield is, of course, romantic relationships and marriage.’ In this love battlefield, Yang argues that women can achieve their desired ends with a ‘thick’ face that hides their true emotions, and a ‘black heart’ that is capable of manipulating men. I asked Lilian: ‘Don’t you think it is unequal for woman to fight only on the romantic relationship battlefield?’. She answered without any hesitation: ‘Of course not.’ Astounded, I added: ‘But isn’t a woman doing much more work than a man, given that she has to work and fight in the outside battlefield as well?’. Instead of answering my question, Lilian, frowning impatiently, responded: ‘Isn’t reading Yang’s books much easier than making money on your own?’. Lilian’s question disturbed me profoundly, yet it was precisely that unpleasant anxiety that pushed me to investigate evidence of the structural powerlessness of Chinese women. I found, first, that the participation rate for Chinese women in the labour force declined from 72.4 per cent in 1990 to 64.0 per cent in 2014. At the same time, wage equality ratio for similar work was 0.65 in 2016, which means that women earn only 65 per cent of the salary men earn for similar work. Second, the glass ceiling still exists. In 2016, women made up only one-­fifth of those employed at the level of legislators, senior officials and managers. Third, there is an alarming disparity between men and women’s property ownership. In China’s top real-­estate markets—the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen—only 30 per cent of marital home deeds include the woman’s name, even though over 70 per cent of women contribute to the purchase of the marital home (Fincher 2014, p.  14). This is also evidenced by the fact that many of Yang’s fans are concerned about how to persuade their husbands-­to-be and parents-­in-law to add their names to the property certificate. All these statistics indicate the diminishing possibility for women to have a financially independent life outside of marriage. Economic inferiority makes women structurally powerless and further puts many women in a disadvantaged position in marriage. Successology, overall, is popular because it claims to offer answers to the challenges individuals face in the competitive ‘Darwinian’ context of twenty-­ first-century China. Twisted female successology sells placebos for women’s structural powerlessness. It is no exaggeration to claim that urban China is ‘a brutally competitive, almost Darwinistic place; the weak, feeble, unintelligent, or unskilled are quickly crushed and cast aside’ (Campanella 2008, p. 294). In response to the new socio-­economic regime, Chinese urbanites have, in a ­cultural

Successology for women   57 sense, become the ‘New Amer­icans’: they live in fear of losing out while also nourishing an obsession with ‘winners’, specifically the classical liberal-­ bourgeois icon of the self-­made man (Hendriks 2016, p. 323). This dichotomy of winners and losers, strengthened by radically new socio-­economic opportunities, risks and insecurities, is felt by women as well. As one woman participant at the love storm workshop said after receiving seven hours of intense training: ‘I feel well-­placed to win’. The tagline of Yang’s (2015b) book The Secret of Perfect Relationships reads: ‘Change your thoughts, discipline your actions, then you can become a “winner in life” (rensheng yingjia).’ Relationship expert Yang’s twisted female successology feeds into women’s strenuous quest for life as a winner or, more precisely, life as a winner’s wife. Behind this voguish slogan is a set of surprisingly convoluted and conventional gender norms, invoking a nostalgia for conservative gender role fixity. This nostalgia perhaps serves as an antidote to the anxiety individuals experience in the face of the new socio-­ economic order. In this chapter I have referred to Yang’s relationship self-­help advice as ‘twisted’ because, like entrepreneurial successology, Yang echoes successology’s logic of ‘not focusing outward on the external advantages or limitations but rather on self-­making’ (Davies 2010, p.  194). In the preface to Relationship Thick Black Theory, Yang reminds readers that the Darwinian survivors are those who can change and adapt to the mainstream: ‘It is meaningless to pursue equality in an unequal society. What a rational individual, or a rational woman, should do is endeavour to maximize her own interest in an unequal society’ (Yang 2015c, p. 9). I refer to Yang’s approach as ‘female successology’ because Yang takes elements of the content of entrepreneurial successology that caters to men and displaces it into relationship self-­help inventories that target women. The ‘perseverance, determination, endurance and hard-­work’ (Davies 2010, p. 194) that the entrepreneur is urged to apply to his career are the characteristics a young woman must apply to improve her MV and lower her PU. The devotion to a ‘calling’ which the ambitious businessman applies to earning money is to be applied by Yang’s readers to seeking and securing a husband who has the potential for high parental investment. The belief in working hard and aiming high, the desire to go for it, to succeed, which entrepreneurs use to survive and thrive in a rough-­and-tumble marketplace, Yang urges women to transfer to their emotion work in order to sustain the value of male provider–female emotion worker transactions. One of Yang’s fans, Shelley, demonstrates her embrace of the twisted logic of female successology when she tells me that ‘you can’t change the whole society, so you’d better change yourself ’. Shelley underwent plastic surgery twice within 18 months—rhinoplasty and canthus operations. She also lost ten kilogrammes in six months and then changed her entire wardrobe. Finally, after these MV improvements, Shelly found a boyfriend—according to her, an alpha male—and began to lower her PU in order to secure him. This idea of ‘seeking answers through individual change, not social change’ is widely seen in self-­help books. As political scientist Wendy Brown (2006, p.  704) argues, neoliberal

58   Haiping Liu governmentality can lead individuals to attempt to make local changes themselves, rather than pushing for structural and social change: ‘a set of practices of individualized/market-­based solutions appearing in lieu of collective political solutions: gated communities for concerns about security and safety; bottled water for concerns about water purity; and private schools (or vouchers) for failing public schools.’ For the Chinese government, nothing could be more useful in preventing activism than ‘the depoliticizing narratives of self-­help author-­speakers who reframe every social issue as an individual challenge to be overcome through individual self-­improvement rather than collective action or policy reform’ (Hendriks 2006, p. 322). In a parallel fashion, in order to educate women to be ‘virtuous wives and good mothers’ and to prevent feminist activism, nothing could be more effective than a twisted female successology that coincidentally reframes the state governance of women as self-­interested personal strategies. Yang’s twisted female successology offers the opportunity for women, in Brown’s words, to ‘opt out’ rather than address political problems. The cruelty of society, Yang (2015a, pp.  174–175) emphasizes, is ‘that you cannot do whatever you want to do.… If you insist on going against the mainstream, you will only end up being discarded by it’. To those who aspire to have families, Yang (2015a, p.  175) suggests: ‘It wouldn’t be too early to get married immediately after graduating from university. The later, the riskier. The swifter, the better.’ To avoid becoming a loser in the marriage market, the reader must learn from Yang (2015b, back cover) how to ‘objectively understand women’s sexual privileges and rationally adopt advantages and avoid disadvantages in dealing with relationship problems between men and women’. Through these persuasive arguments, Yang cultivates a model neoliberal citizen, who ‘strategizes for her or himself among various social, political, and economic options’, rather than one who will ‘strive with others to alter or organize these options’ (Brown 2005, p.  43). When changing society or the world at a macro level is no longer possible, people turn to making individualist changes at a micro level. Now that neither feminism nor social policies are able to address women’s structural powerlessness in China, why not read some twisted successology in order to survive in the inescapable system? Yang (2015b, p.  39) stresses the value of her panacea, the PU: ‘Keeping your PU always low is the only and the most solid way to have a long-­term good relationship’ (emphasis added). What Yang’s twisted female successology closes off are possibilities, not only for women but also for men. Female successology removes the possibility that women might achieve financial independence outside marriage or have casual sex for pleasure. But it also removes the possibilities of advocating for men’s access to emotions and vulnerability, of destigmatizing men as caregivers and homemakers and of motivating citizens and governments to achieve collective change to address social problems in marriage and intimate romantic relationships.

Successology for women   59

Conclusion Reviving traditional gender norms with a new spin, relationship expert Yang claims to offer a practical set of tools for feminine self-­knowledge, self-­help and self-­governance. Yang’s sociobiological arguments rapidly gained legitimacy because their fundamental logic of control dovetails with the Chinese government’s marriage promotion and eugenics campaign. Insisting on a successology rhetoric that encourages women to solve their problems through self-­remaking, relationship expert Yang quantifies and commodifies women’s attractiveness, naturalizes women’s emotion work, encourages cosmetic surgery and justifies all these with scientific authority and neoliberal rationality. She consistently reminds women that the social system they live in is inescapable, that they had best adapt to it and that a relationship expert can tell them how. The idealized relationship model that Yang proposes—in which women exchange emotional value for men’s provider value—obscures and reinforces the wider underlying structural powerlessness of women in Chinese society. This study does not presume that the existence and popularity of relationship experts merely ‘mirror cultural values’; rather, it seeks to lay bare the role of relationship experts’ self-­help discourse as ‘participat[ing] in the creation of them [cultural values]’ (Simonds 1992, p.  8). That is to say, the relationship between these ‘experts’ and changes in women’s lives can be said to work in two directions: the anxiety about being a ‘leftover woman’, the panic to marry, the dominance of neoliberal rationality, the popularity of successology and the boom in plastic surgery all helped to create an atmosphere in which relationship experts could flourish and, conversely, the proliferation of such ‘experts’ reinforces these ideologies and practices. From the perspective of the younger generations, the current popularity of twisted female successology can be seen as a testimony to the enduring pressures and profound anxieties felt by Chinese women, a response to contemporary demographic and economic changes, and to the young women’s strong connections to a scientific utopia, articulated through the language of sociobiology and rationality.

Notes 1 ‘Comfort women’ were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied territories before and during World War II. Controversy over and protest against the term remains, especially from surviving women and the nations from which they were taken: they say it is wrong to continue to refer to the women as ‘comfort women’ when in fact they were ‘sex slaves’. 2 The term ‘bare branches’ (guanggun) is used to describe unmarried men without children, whose presence in society is linked to a series of social problems including sex crimes, trafficking in women and increased domestic social conflict. For further discussion, see Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 3 It is worth mentioning that China’s one-­child policy was not fully implemented throughout the country, especially in the rural areas. Moreover, since 2016 a two-­child policy has replaced the previous policy, in the hope of alleviating the problem of an ageing population.

60   Haiping Liu

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4 Holding virtual hands An ethical practice against male infidelity in digital China Yi Zhou

I gave my husband so much space. I trusted him since we’ve known each other for a long time. But what did he do in return? He took his mistress to Hong Kong to have their second child. It was then that I finally realized that he had an extramarital affair (chugui le). (Zhu Tongfan, 38-year-­old divorced woman, Hangzhou, September 2016)

Zhu Tongfan was born in a county-­level city in Zhejiang province in Southern China. Zhu and her husband were high school classmates and started dating when they were still in high school. After graduating from college, they moved to the capital of Zhejiang, Hangzhou, to seek better job opportunities. Zhu found a job in a new media company which owned a popular bulletin board system. She was an editor for the literature section, an online space where Chinese women actively wrote amateur fiction and read one another’s internet stories. Zhu also took on most of the domestic chores so that her husband could concentrate on developing his career. Zhu’s husband established his own business and it was going very well. But, unfortunately, as in many of the online stories that Zhu edited, Zhu’s rich husband had a mistress on the side. His mistress gave birth to two children out of wedlock. Eventually, Zhu’s husband divorced her. Zhu’s tragic experience is not rare. As John Osburg’s (2013) ethnography illustrates, having a mistress is a common practice among rich Chinese businessmen. It allows them to show off their economic prosperity and demonstrate their virility. However, having a mistress is not solely a rich man’s privilege. Suowei Xiao’s (2011) research shows that many low-­ranked white-­collar workers and working-­class men also have mistresses (most of their mistresses are rural-­tocity female migrants who demand very limited financial support). For elite businessmen, having a mistress is a way of gaining extra ‘face’ in their business dealings. By contrast, for lower middle-­class men, who feel marginalized in the competitive market, keeping a mistress is a way of regaining confidence, since they feel that they are the ‘breadwinners’ in their second households. Despite this class difference, Xiao’s research sheds light on the prevalence of male infidelity in China nowadays.

Holding virtual hands   63 Male infidelity can take numerous forms. Having a mistress, in the sense of maintaining a long-­term relationship with a woman other than a marriage partner and financially supporting her, is only one form. Other forms can be one-­nightstands, purchasing sexual services from sex workers and having a lover without a financial commitment. In China all these types of extramarital affairs are now called ‘chugui’, literally meaning ‘derailment’. Of course, married women can also be unfaithful. However, there are more Chinese men engaging in adulterous affairs than Chinese women. A research report released by the Heilongjiang Women’s Research Institute in 2015 showed that 85 per cent of divorced men in Heilongjiang province had had affairs and that most of these affairs occurred while their wives were pregnant or nursing infants (People’s Daily 2015). This provincial research echoed a national survey conducted by Renmin University in the same year. That survey showed that the number of cheating husbands was twice that of cheating wives (Pan and Huang 2013). In my fieldwork interviews carried out in Beijing and Hangzhou between 2012 and 2014, I found that many women liked to use a well-­known Chinese saying to describe the male infidelity rampant in China: ‘All crows are equally black’ (Tianxia wuya yibanhei). These women differed in their age, marital status and socioeconomic background. Some had experienced their husbands cheating on them; others had seen their fathers cheating on their mothers. Even women who were not in a committed relationship during the interview period were still concerned that one of the ‘black crows’ might betray them in the future. In response, these women formed a large online community where they actively wrote and read fiction about men’s infidelity and women’s precarious position in marriage. By projecting their sadness, frustration and uneasiness into fiction, they attempted to articulate and heal themselves from their trauma—real or imagined. Divorced professional woman Zhu Tongfan said later in the interview quoted at the beginning of this chapter that she quit her editorial job after her divorce so that she could create a new life for herself. However, she kept reading online stories because these stories, in Zhu’s words, ‘warmed me when I was alone in the cold evenings’. Continuing the ethnographic approach taken in Chapters 2 and 3, my chapter examines the gender and social ramifications of women’s digital writing, reading and healing that has taken shape in the context of the increasing prevalence of male infidelity in contemporary China. To do so, I used Jinjiang Literature City—one of the largest websites for women’s creative writing and reading—as my research field to trace three literary practices: ‘writing against Qiong Yao’, ‘speaking bitterness’ and ‘taking action’.1 I also conducted in-­depth interviews in person with 15 female participants to grasp the interrelations between the women’s digital practices and their lived experiences.2 The three literary practices are sequential. ‘Writing against Qiong Yao’ emerged ten years ago when Chinese women’s digital writing and reading was just gaining momentum. Qiong Yao, a romance writer from Taiwan, had garnered fame in mainland China in the 1980s. In this early reform era, Chinese readers extracted the notion of free love (ziyou lianai) from Qiong Yao’s novels

64   Yi Zhou and discursively treated free love as a liberating discourse that could challenge the state’s authority in managing citizens’ intimate relations. However, 30 years later, female netizens argued that this discourse of free love overemphasized modern individualism while obscuring the cruelty of male infidelity. By pointing out that heroes from Qiong Yao’s novels often sought free love outside of marriage, this younger generation saw free love as a problematic discourse that romanticized men’s chugui. They thus became what Henry Jenkins (1992) calls ‘textual poachers’ who wrote fanfiction to mock free love and punish the disloyal heroes. ‘Writing against Qiong Yao’ then gradually led to the wave of ‘speaking bitterness’. Women leapt from the realm of fanfiction writing into creating new genres that incorporated their own life traumas. This digital version of speaking bitterness was collective. After a woman had shared her bitter story on the internet, other women often left their online comments and generated a chain of speaking bitterness. This act of collective speaking allowed women to bring their single voices together to constitute a larger statement, pointing out that it was the structural inequalities between the two genders, rather than men’s biological differences, that sanctioned men’s extramarital affairs and caused women’s marital vulnerability. ‘Speaking bitterness’ thus bridged the gap between self-­healing and feminist consciousness-­raising. It quickly led women to encourage one another to use divorce as the means to end the trauma caused by their cheating husbands, regardless of the fact that female divorcées are still stigmatized in a patriarchal society such as China. At this stage, ‘speaking bitterness’ turned into ‘taking action’. Women participants began to write and read fiction to promote female-­ initiated divorce, discuss women’s post-­divorce lives and hold their virtual hands to support their divorced ‘sisters’. Based on my analysis of the ways in which women weaved their life experiences and affective emotions into their digital narratives and online actions, I argue that women’s internet writing, reading and healing is an ethical practice that confronts patriarchal norms and advances gender consciousness. My thinking about ethical practice is informed by Naisargi N. Dave, who defines ethical practice as a ‘creative, disruptive response to normalization’, with ‘normalization’ defined as ‘a narrowing of possibilities’ (2012, p. 3). In what follows, I first explain the concept of ‘ethical practice’ and then substantiate my main argument. Specifically, I describe how women formed the three literary practices mentioned above to creatively disrupt the discourse of free love, the rhetoric of biological differences and the stigma attached to female divorcées. By illustrating how women dismantled the discourse, rhetoric and stigma which normalize male infidelity and limit women’s life possibilities, I cast light on women’s endeavours to seek personal and social change.

Ethical practice As Dave (2012) clearly distinguishes in her study of queer women’s activism in India, ethics and morality are two distinct categories. Whereas morality refers to ‘norms for “proper” gendered, sexual, and familial comportment, and a structure

Holding virtual hands   65 for the maintenance of existing relations of power’, ethics refers to the ‘undoing of social morality’ (Dave 2012, p.  6). In other words, ethics and morality are oppositional. To elaborate this contrast I begin with morality. Clearly, morality is not naturally passed from one generation to the next in a society. Rather, the maintenance of a moral structure requires a sustained effort from cultural subjects who constantly cultivate the moral sense of the self. Anthropologists Saha Mahmood (2005) and Lila Abu-­Lughod’s (2000) ethnographies give eloquent examples of women’s moral cultivation. Mahmood (2005) illustrates how Egyptian women formed a piety movement in which women taught each other Islamic doctrine to construct an ideal pious self. Similarly, Abu-­Lughod (2000) demonstrates that Bedouin women of the Awlad ‘Ali tribe actively practised the cultural norms of veiling and gender separation. By doing so, Bedouin women turned themselves into morally recognizable subjects and underpinned the moral code of modesty. It is important to point out that both Egyptian and Bedouin women exerted their moral agency to negotiate with the patriarchal system. The Egyptian women’s piety movement altered the male-­dominated culture of mosques. Bedouin women claimed that they were independent humans who were autonomously cultivating a moral self rather than being forced to do so. This claim challenged the discriminatory cultural logic that maintained that women do not have the capacity for self-­control. Yet, the exercise of this moral agency, I argue, was a form of ‘positive feedback’ that reinforced the status quo of the moral system and shook the patriarchal structure with limited subversive power. In contrast to moral practice, Dave argues that ethical practice can disrupt mainstream discourses, question moral codes and transgress power hierarchies. In her ethnography, Dave illustrates how lesbian women in India organized themselves and presented a visible image to the public. Their visibility problematized the heteronormative, nationalistic discourse which asserted that India— unlike the West—did not have homosexuals. Furthermore, lesbian women invented a new queer imaginary by making cultural products and developing local vocabularies for same-­sex sexuality. By doing so, lesbian women circulated affective energies that motivated them to shape new forms of sociality. Their new sociality, in turn, emboldened them to create innovative activities in their quest for sexual rights. This was non-­stop politics, ‘through and through’ (Dave 2012, p. 4). It is necessary to reiterate Dave’s argument that the lesbian women’s activism was an ethical practice. Rather than discovering their true yet hidden sexual desires, these women activists performed the work to become lesbians by undoing the mainstream discourse and the already given moral codes for proper behaviour. Or, using Michel Foucault’s words which Dave in fact quotes, ‘It’s up to us to advance into a homosexual ascesis that would make us work on ourselves and invent (I don’t say discover) a manner of being that is still improbable’ (cited in Dave 2012, p. 7). What Foucault means by ‘homosexual ascesis’, as Dave explains, is ‘neither asceticism nor a form of identity politics’ (2012, p.  7). Rather, it is a ‘philosophical labor’ to ‘think differently, to ask new

66   Yi Zhou q­ uestions of oneself in order to analyze and surpass the limits upon what can be said and done’ (Dave 2012, p. 8). I borrow Dave’s concept of ethical practice to examine how heterosexual women in China use digital writing and reading to undo the popular discourse of free love, the dominant rhetoric of biological differences and the long-­held stigma attached to divorced women. I argue that the women’s online activities, which were inevitably entangled with their offline activities, constituted an ethical practice rather than a moralistic stance.

Writing against Qiong Yao In the 1980s and continuing through the early 1990s, Qiong Yao’s romance fiction and television dramas adapted from her work sparked what was called ‘Qiong Yao fever’ in Mainland China. Thomas B. Gold notes that Qiong Yao’s romances, among other popular culture from Taiwan and Hong Kong, concentrates on ‘small incidents and feelings that people can identify with’ (1993, p. 914). Her work thus sharply contrasted with the heavily ideological cultural products of the mainland and quickly became the primary conduit through which Chinese people could express their individual sentiments. Perhaps nothing can be more individualistic and sentimental than the pursuit of free love. As Haiyan Lee (2007) points out, pursuing free love is about searching for autonomy and fully disclosing one’s feelings to one’s lover. Lee further demonstrates that pursuing free love is a dual experience. On the one hand, lovers remove themselves from ‘a viscerally resilient web of social bonds’; on the other hand, they establish their ‘romantic identity as autonomous individuals free to contract new, adventurous, and democratic forms of sociability’ (Lee 2007, p. 96). In the early reform era, this notion of free love was the rubric for Chinese citizens to understand Qiong Yao’s romances. Readers interpreted the behaviour of the married hero as an expression of individual freedom: falling in love with a young girl, extracting himself from his marital relations and constituting a new selfhood to pursue free love. This interpretation neatly dovetailed with readers’ desires to resist the state’s control over their personal lives. In an interview, Teacher Huang, a 54-year-­old Hangzhou native who teaches at a local high school, recalled why Qiong Yao’s stories touched her: Our time was different from yours. When I was in my college [in the 1980s], the whole society was still quite conservative. Let me tell you a story of my classmate from my college. He was dating a girl, but at the same time, he also had an ambiguous relationship with another girl (youxie aimei).… Somebody reported his behaviour to our school.… Then, the second girl told the Dean that my classmate had two maple leaves—one was given to his official girlfriend and the other was given to her—and the two leaves were exactly the same.… My classmate was a very capable man and he was the candidate for the Third Echelon (of the future cadres).… But after graduation, he was assigned to a primary school located in a very poor village

Holding virtual hands   67 [instead of being appointed to a cadre position].… It was such a trivial matter (poshi) [that destroyed his future].… What I am telling you was the reason why Qiong Yao’s stories were so popular at that time. There was no real free love because you were not free … Qiong Yao told us what freedom was. According to Teacher Huang, the environment in the 1980s was ‘still quite conservative’ because citizens’ intimate relations were under severe scrutiny and they ‘were not free’. However, the 1980s was also the period of transformation during which the cultural ethos of individualism was growing, due partly to China’s economic reforms as well as the influences of popular culture from Taiwan and Hong Kong that taught citizens ‘what freedom was’. Situated in this context, free love in Qiong Yao’s romances was discursively read as a modern individualism by the older generation that yearned for an escape from the state’s authority. However, in the new millennium, a significant number of women began to delink free love from modern individualism and relink it to extramarital liaisons. This younger generation, as Jin Feng (2013) highlights, simplified the reading of Qiong Yao’s romances by reducing the complexity of the texts into narratives of male infidelity. The similarity between these two generations is that they both intentionally extracted the notion of free love from Qiong Yao’s novels for their own purposes. However, the older generation saw free love as a liberating discourse that liquidated the lack of individual freedom in society at the time, while the younger generation saw free love as a disturbing discourse within the resurgence of patriarchy in contemporary China. Specifically, young netizens argued that free love in Qiong Yao’s stories led directly to adultery in the married-­male/single-­female pattern. These women also pointed out that men’s pursuit of free love outside their marriages was a feudal, backward behaviour; it was not modern at all. For example, Longlong, a married woman with a one-­year-old child, said in an interview: You can use an old Chinese saying to summarize the behaviour of the heroes in Qiong Yao’s romances: Concubines are favoured over wives. Secret lovers, however, could be better than concubines [because of the furtiveness and excitement of being caught] (qi buru qie, qie buru tou). The heroes [in Qiong Yao’s novels] are not so different from the men who lived in ancient China. In addition, these women argued that men’s autonomous agency in pursuing free love ignored the conjugal responsibility and the mutual respect between husband and wife. This male autonomy was selfish. Enzhu, a 27-year-­old woman who had been married for one year without children, said: The most hateful thing is that some people only care about their own love and totally dismiss other people’s [feelings]. It is selfish if you sacrifice

68   Yi Zhou somebody else’s happiness [for your own happiness] … That’s why I don’t like Qiong Yao’s romances. Qiong Yao only depicts [the romantic scenes of] wind, flowers, snow and moonlight (fenghuaxueyue) and ignored responsibility and loyalty. In her stories, men do not respect their wives. Writing fanfiction became a new form of social action these women used to oppose Qiong Yao or, more precisely, to oppose the discourse of free love that women argued concealed the persistence and cruelty of men’s adultery in China. By reinforcing the wife’s position, women boldly depicted how the wife took revenge on the philandering husband. This type of fanfiction quickly became viral on the internet and women tried diverse ways to expand and modify the original texts. For example, a modern girl time-­travels back to the Qing Dynasty and becomes the revengeful wife in Qiong Yao’s historical romances (time travel); the wife regains her second life and tries to change her own fate (regeneration); the deserted wife begins her own life journey after divorce (sequel).3 Women’s fanfiction writing has been described as ‘a constant cycle of artistic practice’, where there is ‘a constant state of flux, of shifting and chaotic relation, between new versions of stories and the originary texts’ (Derecho 2006, pp. 76–77). Yet, all these stories share the same ending: the cheating husband’s selfish autonomy in his pursuit of free love turns him into a social outcast. By using this repetitious ending, women criticized free love and reshuffled the power relations between the disloyal husband and the abandoned wife. It is important to point out that this ‘writing against Qiong Yao’ movement was not a literary critique of Qiong Yao’s mode of storytelling. Rather, it was developed in response to free love. By writing fanfiction that problematized the discourse of free love, women demonstrated the critical vigour involved in speaking with a divergent voice. This divergent voice announced plainly that women intended to directly confront male infidelity and unveil the gender inequality in marital relations. The wave of ‘writing against Qiong Yao’ lasted for several years and played a vital role in growing women’s online communities. It was followed by a new literary movement, in which women created original stories (yuanchuang gushi) with new characters and emerging plots, a movement that carved out a space for women to speak their bitterness and disrupt the rhetoric of biological differences.

Speaking bitterness Si Si is a 25-year-­old woman who migrated to Beijing after she graduated from college in Hebei Province. In an interview, Si Si described how an original story ‘tortured her heart’ and made her reading experience a tearful one: The heroine comes home from a business trip. She finds only seven condoms left in the Durex box while there were eight before she left for the trip.… After her husband brings the mistress home and wants to divorce her,

Holding virtual hands   69 the heroine finds that she is pregnant … she plans to get divorced but this decision shocks her traditional parents. Her father dies of a heart attack.… She is so sad that she has a miscarriage.… The tragic things occur one after another. The story tortured [my] heart (nüe’xin). Si Si’s description illuminates the ways in which original stories powerfully pulled women readers to engage emotionally with the sentimental, sensational and traumatic experiences of the heroines. Although Si Si has never been betrayed by the boyfriend she has cohabited with for a year, the narrative of the trauma evoked the deeply-­seated feelings of uneasiness that many Chinese women currently share: I have heard so many real cases [of men cheating on their wives or girlfriends].… My boyfriend is now loyal to me, but the reason is that he does not have money [to financially support a mistress]. His rich boss has five mistresses. Five, can you imagine it? My boyfriend’s position in his company is also low so he does not have a chance to go to a business banquet or take the clients to night clubs where men easily find opportunities for a one-­night-stand … I have an ambivalent feeling. I want him to have a good career. But I also worry about the cost. If he often goes to the night clubs or Karaoke to do business [in pursuit of a good career], who can guarantee that he will be always loyal to me? Si Si then added: Reading this story allows me to relax. Crying is cathartic. Although the story tortured my heart, it also healed me (zhiyu le wo). Who knows, the same thing may happen to me in the future. If you look at the online comments left by women, you would see that men’s cheating behaviour is so common now. Clearly, reading and writing original stories was therapeutic. It allowed women who were either tormented by their husbands’ affairs or deeply anxious about the possibility of being betrayed to have a good cathartic cry. But this practice of self-­healing also housed the capacity for a new social connection. Si Si actively commented on the story, expressed her sympathy with the heroine, and engaged with other women’s comments that were full of expressions of personal pain. In this regard, women did not write or read alone, nor did they self-­ heal alone. Instead, they ‘wrote/read/healed alone together’. The internet has in fact made it possible to draw women into the process of narrating and sharing traumas. These online women readers and writers were speaking bitterness collectively. Speaking bitterness has an important historical precedent in China. It was a political method that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used during the Land Reform movement in 1946 and 1950. By encouraging peasants to narrate their

70   Yi Zhou bitter lives in the ‘old society’ and publicly denounce the landlords who exploited the peasants’ labour, the CCP mobilized peasants to distinguish the ‘evil enemies’ from ‘pure us’. This class struggle smoothed the way for the CCP to acquire land from landlords and bestow it on peasants. Speaking bitterness was ‘not just a pattern of meaning’ but ‘also a form of social interaction’ (Geertz 1973, cited in Wu 2014, p.  21). The speaking-­bitterness sessions (suku dahui) provided a stage for the subalterns to speak and provoke one another into articulating their grievances. Speaking bitterness was interactive and dialogical; it transformed ‘local stories of personal suffering into collective narratives of blood and tears’ (Farquhar and Berry 2004, p. 116). In contemporary times the internet has replaced the speaking-­bitterness sessions of Mao’s years that were face-­to-face and bounded by physical locations (usually village-­based). The internet offers a new stage on which women can lament their personal grievances and become spontaneously drawn into one another’s pain without being constrained by time and locational differences. Below, I excerpt some ‘bitterness’ from women who not only spoke it online but also spoke it again in interviews: When a woman is breastfeeding her baby, she has a higher risk [than other women to be betrayed]. This is the difficult time for women because women must take care of the baby in the evenings alone. Their husbands usually sleep in a separate room and give very little help. Breastfeeding and even child-­raising is considered as a woman’s job. But many women must go back to work when they are still breastfeeding. They are exhausted, so they cannot give too much care and love to their husbands at that time. What women need is care and love from their husbands instead. But their bored husbands often look for care and love outside [of the home].… That’s what I personally experienced. (Wang Shan, 33-year-­old with a five-­year-old son, divorced, living in Hangzhou) Married men have time to go out in the evenings and weekends to play. That’s why there are more men having affairs than women. Women don’t have that time. Women must stay at home to take care of their children, clean the house and wash the clothes. I have a ‘two dots, one straight line’ life (liangdian yixian de shenghuo) [two dots signifies workplace and home and the straight line means a boring life]. (Ma Liang, 38-year-­old, married with one son, living in Beijing) My boss has a mistress and he found a job for his mistress in his own company. He doesn’t even try to hide her.… If a man has one of these— power, money or social status—and his family is harmonious (jiating hexie), he would be looked down upon [by other men]. But if he has a mistress, he would be regarded as a normal man.… Who does not want to have a ‘fresh’ experience? Married women want it too. However, nobody would praise a

Holding virtual hands   71 woman who has an affair. She would be called a bitch or slut. Our society gives men more space than women.… A divorced man can quickly re-­marry but nobody wants to take a divorced woman. (Xiao Qi, 38-year-­old, married with one son, living in Hangzhou) My ex-­husband and I went to the same college. He pursued me for almost one year. We got married several years after we graduated.… When I was eight months pregnant, his mistress came to my office and told me that she was pregnant too … I got divorced and my ex-­husband had to pay RMB1,000 ($150) every month to support our daughter. That’s what the law said. He paid for several months and then he disappeared. Completely disappeared. He changed his job, cellphone number and the rental apartment. He disappeared with his pregnant mistress … I went to his hometown and talked to his parents. His parents said that they did not know where he was. I went to the police station, the police recorded my case. But they’ve never contacted me. Who would protect a divorced woman? Nobody! (Dou Dou, 32-year-­old with a three-­year-old daughter, divorced, living in Hangzhou) Based on their individual experiences, women wove these bitter voices into their digital stories and online comments. Some events were experienced first-­ hand, while others had been observed in their daily lives. Individually, these voices were small. However, together they created what Michel Foucault (1972, pp.  109–133) calls a ‘regime of truth’: collectively, the women produced, distributed and operated a systematic interpretation of male infidelity. This systematic interpretation was not a moral accusation that denounced an individual man’s moral imperfection. Rather, it pointed out that the unequal gender relationships both within and beyond the domestic space were the fundamental reason for men to stray. Specifically, women enumerated three root causes of male infidelity. First, the feminized allocation of domestic work gives men more autonomy after marriage to ‘go out to play’. Second, the double standard in Chinese society is generally permissive towards male infidelity while harshly condemning female infidelity. This breeds a tolerance of men’s extramarital affairs and ‘gives men more space’. Third, the low social and financial cost of infidelity indulges men’s practice of straying from their responsibilities: men who have affairs can easily get divorced, re-­marry and even avoid paying alimony because of weak law enforcement. By pointing out these three root causes, women not only brought gender asymmetries to light but also disrupted the rhetoric of biological differences. In general, the rhetoric of biological differences claims men’s infidelity as biologically ‘natural’ (a man can fertilize multiple women) and motivates men to maximize their sexual partners. In contrast, women are sexually restrained because the limited fertilizing capacity motivates women to choose the best quality mate. This rhetoric is often presented as an objective, scientific finding. For instance, the official news platform, the People’s Daily, published an online article in

72   Yi Zhou 2014 entitled ‘Scientists Discuss Chugui: The Nature of Men’s Unfaithfulness Has to Do with Evolutionary Psychology’ (People’s Daily 2014). In the article, the author used two ‘scientific’ findings to explain male infidelity. The first was the Coolidge Effect, a phenomenon found in Animal Studies, whereby male animals exhibit sexual interest in mating with different female partners. The second was psychologist David Buss’s argument that in order to survive and evolve, animals—including humans—must have as many offspring as possible, and that this evolutionary origin still motivates men to have sex with more than one woman. The article then asserted that male infidelity is men’s ‘default code’ (moren chengxu) produced by their ‘biological nature’ (shengli jichu). Such rhetoric is not rare in official publications. As Harriet Evans (1997) points out, officially sponsored publications often claim that men are sexually active while women are passive. By claiming that women are physically and sexually weak agents whose desires can only be aroused by men, the state ties women’s ‘biological nature’ to motherhood. The rhetoric of biological differences helps the state stabilize family life and maintain heteronormativity. The rhetoric of biological differences is also commonly used by marriage and family counsellors. In the last decade, marriage and family counselling has become a profitable market in China. These counsellors mostly work with wives to help them repel mistresses and save their marriages. Shanghai Weiqing Hospital is one such counselling agency. On its official website, Weiqing Hospital explains that men’s pursuit of illicit affairs is due to men’s biological nature— their excessive hormone secretion in responding to an external seduction, namely, the mistress (Weiqing Wang 2017). According to Weiqing Hospital, although having an affair is inevitable for men since men are driven by their hormones, women may be able to save their marriages if the external seduction is curbed (the mistress is dispelled). From officially sponsored publications to web articles produced by private counselling companies, the rhetoric of biological differences has become the ‘legitimating narrative’ to account for men’s unfaithfulness (Farrer and Sun 2003, p.  7). Yet, women’s acts of speaking bitterness have directly challenged this rhetoric. As Xiao Qi, whose bitter voice was quoted above, states: ‘Who does not want to have a “fresh” experience? Married women want it too.’ Statements such as this suggest that women, like men, might maximize the number of partners if conditions allowed them to do so. Xiao Qi even said in the interview: ‘In the deepest side of the heart (guzi li), women are also yearning for [chugui].… If I meet a man who I appreciate, I might want to have a one-­nightstand [with him] (zuo yici).’ This bold expression of sexual desire puts in question the rhetoric of biological differences, suggesting women are not as sexually passive as the rhetoric suggests. However, women’s desires to have extramarital sex are suppressed by the sexual double standard in China. Although Xiao Qi expressed her desire in the interview, she also insisted that having an affair would be too risky for women because a cheating wife, as opposed to a cheating husband, would be called a slut and socially marginalized. She said: ‘I must control myself.… Everybody has some unstable elements (bu anding de yinsu)

Holding virtual hands   73 at heart. Something that you want to try but you do not dare to.… So you just let it stay in your imagination.’ In addition, women’s double burden also constrains women’s desires to have affairs. Wang Shan had to breastfeed her new-­born in the evening and work in the daytime. Similarly, Ma Liang had to work on weekdays and take care of house chores and look after her child at weekends. Online women writers showcase the lives of married Chinese women, that are ‘two dots, one straight line’. This double-­burdened life exhausts women and prohibits them from ‘going out to play’. To put it directly, women simply do not have the same opportunities to stray as men, though women may have the same desires to flee from ordinariness and have a fresh experience. This discrepancy in opportunity is the product of the imbalanced power relations between the two genders, an imbalance that is further underpinned by the legal system. As Dou Dou’s tragic case shows, cheating husbands who are the ‘party at fault’ in causing marital dissolutions can still escape financial liability, while the betrayed wives carry the financial burden and receive very limited legal protection and social support. From the unequal distribution of domestic responsibilities to the unequal distribution of legal and social power, women’s pronounced bitterness expressed a direct refusal to use the differences of anatomical sex to explain the root causes of male infidelity (or the reasons men are more likely to stray than women). Viewing male infidelity as a socially constructed product allowed women to turn a ‘deaf ear’ to the official promotion of the rhetoric of ‘biological differences’ which justifies men’s chugui, pins women’s ‘biological nature’ to motherhood and upholds a harmonious (patriarchal) society. Speaking bitterness also allowed women to circumvent the hail of the counselling market that coaxes women to save their marriages. Instead, women have begun to advocate for female-­initiated divorce and challenge the stigmatized image of divorced women.

Taking action Divorce is not taboo in China. However, female divorcées are still stigmatized and marginalized. Mainstream popular culture tends to ‘reproduce the victim narratives, enhancing the cultural stereotype that, once divorced, women will become undesirable and worthless’ (Xiao 2014, p.  5). In daily life, divorced women often experience moral accusation (they are regarded as selfish women who demolished their children’s ‘complete’ family), social marginalization (discrimination in the job market and barriers to accessing rental apartments) and financial deterioration (particularly for women who do not own property and are the sole support for their children) (Chan et al. 2005). To avoid this disempowering process of divorce, many women endure adverse conjugal relationships or even seek help from marital counsellors. Yet, in recent years, a new literary movement has emerged as a counterforce: online, women write and read fiction that portrays women’s post-­divorce lives. These stories function as pedagogical texts through which women teach and encourage each other to use divorce to change their lives. In the rest of this

74   Yi Zhou section, I use a detailed case to exemplify how women produce this type of digital narrative. The stories often start with speaking bitterness and then proceed to exchanges about divorced women’s experiences. Through these accounts, women wrestle with the cultural representations that stereotype divorced women and seek to forge a female–female bond to resist male infidelity that is rooted in the patriarchal hegemony. In September 2014, a woman with the pen name Sa Kongkong began to upload a semi-­autobiographic story to Jinjiang Literature City online. The story is titled ‘Lost Marriage’ (shihun).4 The heroine, Ning Zhen, discovers that her husband has been having an affair while she has been nursing her baby daughter. Although Ning Zhen decides to get divorced, the cheating husband’s cousin visits to persuade her to stay in the marriage. The cousin says: Ning Zhen, … life will be difficult for a divorced woman who has a child. Yes, everybody knows that Dong Chengye [the husband] is a jerk. But he will marry a young, never-­married woman soon. The reason is that he is a man. His income is good and his job is stable. He does not have a financial burden and he knows how to please women. You are different. You are a woman, you have a child. It is way too difficult for you to find a suitable man again.5 Ning Zhen knows that what the cousin points out is the reality. A divorced woman is regarded as a ‘used item’, referred to as ‘broken shoes’ (poxie), that men will not want. However, she still decides to get divorced. She says to herself: ‘I just want to escape from this unbearable marriage soon. Only by doing that, can [I] find a way to survive.’ Ning Zhen eventually gets divorced. But her ex-­husband claims that he does not have savings and that his apartment is not his property (he transfers the ownership to his parents). Several months after their divorce, he stops paying alimony to support their daughter. By using Ning Zhen’s monologue, the author Sa Kongkong criticizes the legal system in China which fails not only to protect women’s rights to fair compensation but also to address the power asymmetries between wives and husbands: China’s law does not, fundamentally, protect women’s rights.… It claims gender equality. However, [it does not acknowledge that] women and men occupy unequal positions in marriage.… Both the husband and the wife must work and earn money, but women must take care of the chores and raise children alone.… Once men have affairs, women’s financial security can only rely on the conscience of the unfaithful husbands. It is not rare for [the husband] to transfer his property to other people and drive their ex-­ wives out of the home. At this moment, women’s efforts put into child-­ raising and house-­keeping [are] worth nothing.6 This kind of criticism is very common in Sa Kongkong’s semi-­autobiography. By situating Ning Zhen’s personal trauma in a wider social and gender context,

Holding virtual hands   75 Sa Kongkong turns this semi-­autobiography into a social commentary and connects self-­healing to gender consciousness-­raising. In response, Sa Kongkong received expressions of sympathy from readers who also revealed their own traumas to each other. For instance, reader Weiwei said in her online comments: ‘My ex-­husband cheated on me when I was pregnant and then he had another affair later. When we got divorced, our baby was four years old. What Sa Kongkong experienced was exactly what I experienced too.’ Reader Titi similarly said: ‘The mistress appeared after I had my son. My son was not even three months old.’ Reader La was younger, and she said: ‘It reminds me of my father. He fell in love with another woman when I was one month old.’ These women not only formed a chain of speaking bitterness but also followed Sa Kongkong in criticizing gender inequalities. Reader yanguoliuhen said: ‘In marriage, men and women are not equal, especially after they have kids. Doing housework and taking care of children … cost [women] a lot of time. The Marriage Law does not protect women.’ Reader ff was of the opinion that: ‘Chinese society only pursues superficial gender-­equality. But it is not equal. It is way too tolerant of irresponsible men [who have affairs].’ Reader qiuyuzhoulai believed that, ‘The cost for [disloyal men] to get divorced is not high. That’s why it cannot bound men’s [desires to chugui].’ At this moment of speaking bitterness and reiterating the root causes of men’s disloyalty in a collective sense, Sa Kongkong disappeared as an individual writer and re-­emerged as what Foucault calls an author with a social function. She hailed other women to exercise the ‘regime of truth’, the hierarchal gender relations that buttress male infidelity and cause women’s shared precarity in marriage (Foucault 1998, pp. 205–222). In reality, the author Sa Kongkong divorced her husband. This semi-­ autobiographical story articulated Sa Kongkong’s idea that divorce was the only way for betrayed wives to survive. While writing this survival novella to encourage other women to end their wounded lives through divorce, Sa Kongkong also refused to romanticize post-­divorce life. Using Ning Zhen’s interior monologue, Sa Kongkong said: Facing my husband’s chugui, I chose [divorce as] a very different way [from women who stayed in their broken marriages] to disobey this patriarchal society … I know, divorce can end the painful [marital] relationship. But it will open up a difficult life.7 In the rest of the story, Sa Kongkong portrays the financial burden, social isolation and marginalization in both the labour and re-­marriage markets that a female divorcée faces. The hardship of the post-­divorce life, however, is also a transformative experience for Ning Zhen/Sa Kongkong. As Ning Zhen says: ‘I just realized how lazy I was. I did not learn how to drive because I thought Dong Chenye would be the chauffeur … I have never really been independent.’ Ning Zhen later learns how to drive, finds two jobs to support her daughter and eventually creates a meaningful life for herself as an independent woman. This

76   Yi Zhou process of self-­reflection and self-­cultivation drew readers to share their own experiences of post-­divorce life. For example, the reader Weiwei mentioned above said: ‘I was sick and lying in bed for one month.… Now [after divorce], I am more beautiful and confident than before.’ In the online literary community ‘Lost Marriage’ is not the only case where women shape an intersubjective solidarity through collectively narrating a bitter life before divorce and a hopeful one after divorce. Women participants even now call divorce ‘cutting your losses immediately’ (jishi zhisun). ‘Cutting your losses immediately’ is a phrase originally used by stockbrokers to refer to the need for a shareholder to sell stock as soon as it begins to trend negatively on the market. But the expression refers to more than forecasting and measuring crises. It also refers to a hope–destruction cycle, i.e. ‘stop hoping that this stock will go up later; it will not, so the best option is to sell it right now’. Women compare a marriage ruined by a cheating husband to ‘bad’ stock which will not recover and from which divorce is the only way to cut their losses and begin a new life journey. The term ‘cutting your losses immediately’ in fact changes the meaning of divorce from a life trauma to a life opportunity. I argue that remaking the meaning of divorce is crucial for women. It provides women with a new identity as strong survivors rather than pitiful divorced women. It also encourages women to empower themselves by becoming the masters of their own lives rather than seeing themselves as deserted wives trying to save their shattered marriages. Not all women agree with Sa Kongkong’s claim that ‘cutting your losses immediately’ is a protest that ‘disobey[s] this patriarchal society’. However, they still contribute to a gradual shift in gender consciousness by rejecting the entrenched stigmatization of female divorcées and by making a better post-­divorce life imaginable. While Sa Kongkong was still updating her semi-­autobiographical story online, her ex-­husband learned that he was the prototypical male figure harshly criticized by Sa Kongkong’s women readers. He was furious and left contemptuous comments on Sa Kongkong’s Sina Microblog. Women participants quickly fought back, whether they had read Sa Kongkong’s story or not. Women turned themselves into what have been called ‘human flesh search engines’ (renrou sousuo). They tracked down Sa Kongkong’s ex-­husband’s IP address, followed his previous browsing history, shared information with each other and used the information they had found as a thread for further searches. Through their spontaneous and collaborative work, the women eventually discovered his real name, photos and workplace. The women then exposed his infidelity as well as his personal information on social media platforms and called for a public denouncement. They also found his work unit’s Sina Microblog account and left a statement firmly calling for his work unit to fire him. Although this petition did not get him fired, the women formed a loosely collective moment through which they developed an immediate sense of solidarity. Of course, this small incident cannot be called a political mobilization for structural change. However, it was a radical move for women to launch internet activism in the public domain to resist male infidelity which had often

Holding virtual hands   77 been viewed as a domestic, private issue. By exploring new methods for connecting with ever larger groups, the women attempted to smash the stigma of female divorcées. Rather than accepting the mainstream culture’s label of ‘broken shoes’, divorced women are presenting themselves as strong women who are developing their capacity for self-­authorship and who can come together in a new form of support network.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have traced three sequential literary practices that have emerged in women’s digital communities. I have shown how these literary practices proliferated and became interlinked to shape a ‘swarm of points of resistance’ against male infidelity (Foucault 1978, p. 96). Drawing on Dave’s (2012) notion of ethics, I have argued that these desperate and passionate acts of resistance are ethical practices that creatively disrupt the dominant cultural codes: the discourse of free love, the rhetoric of biological differences and the stigma attached to divorced women. In this regard, the ethical dimension of the women’s resistance went beyond a simple judgement about which gender is doing what is right and morally superior and which gender is doing what is wrong and morally decadent. The practices of the women’s ethical resistance produced cleavages in a patriarchal system upheld by the dominant free love discourse, biological essentialist rhetoric and the cultural stigma around divorced women. My conclusion therefore contrasts with that of Janice Radway’s (1984) research on popular literature and gender politics in the US. In her ethnography Reading the Romance, Radway (1984) convincingly argued that Amer­ican female readers who gained vicarious pleasure from relating to the heroines in romance novels in fact reinforced the patriarchal system in three ways. First, women did not challenge traditional gender roles, as they were yearning to be loved and protected, like the feminine heroines, by a tender and yet masculine hero. Second, women did not challenge the female virtues, as women refused to read romances that portrayed unrestrained female sexual desire. Third, women did not challenge the institution of marriage, as they still expected the stories to conclude with a happy heterosexual marriage. In contrast, my research shows that Chinese women deployed the ‘writing against Qiong Yao’ movement to empower abandoned wives, portraying them as not needing protection from men. The women in my research also enacted a digital version of ‘speaking bitterness’ to undo the biological determinism that attempted to engender a passive female sexuality. Finally, the women took action to dismantle patriarchal marriages. Holding their virtual hands in the internet era, these Chinese women formed a participatory environment through which they could transform their self-­fashioning into a gradual shift in gender consciousness, thus making a gender revolution possible.

78   Yi Zhou

Notes 1 Jinjiang Literature City can be accessed via www.jjwxc.net./. 2 I conducted interviews in Beijing and Hangzhou during 2012–2014. These two cosmopolitan cities allowed me to access a diverse pool of female informants. Some of the 15 women were natives of Beijing or Hangzhou while others later migrated to these two cities. Their age ranges (from 21 to 54), marital status and socioeconomic backgrounds also differed. 3 A collection of anti-­Qiong Yao fanfic in Jinjiang can be accessed via www.jjwxc.net/ onebook.php?novelid=810059 (accessed on 29 June 2018). 4 ‘Lost Marriage’ can be accessed via www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=2154846. 5 www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=2154846&chapterid=7 (accessed 30 October 2018). 6 www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=2154846&chapterid=8 (accessed 30 October 2018). 7 www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=2154846&chapterid=10 (accessed 30 October 2018).

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Holding virtual hands   79 Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Lee, Haiyan. 2007. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Osburg, John. 2013. Anxious Wealth: Money and Mobility among China’s New Rich. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pan, Suimin with Huang, Yingying. 2013. Xingzhibian [The Changes of Sexuality]. Beijing: Renmin University Press. People’s Daily. 2014. ‘Kexuejia tan “chugui”: nanren huaxin tianxing yu jinghua xinli youguan’ [Scientists Discuss chugui: The Nature of Men’s Unfaithfulness Has to Do with Evolutionary Psychology], 1 April. http://culture.people.com.cn/n/2014/0401/ c172318-24793722.html (accessed 10 December 2017). People’s Daily. 2015. ‘Heilongjiang funü yanjiuhui diaocha xianshi: hunwaiqing jingjibaoli chengwei lihunzhuyin’ [Research by the Heilong Women’s Research Institute Shows Extramarital Affairs and Economic Violence Have Become the Main Causes of Divorce], 23 March. http://hlj.people.com.cn/n/2015/0323/c220027-24245840.html (accessed 22 January 2016). Radway, Janice. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Weiqing Wang. 2017. ‘Nanren yu nüren chugui you shenme butong’ [What Are the Differences between Male and Female Infidelity?], 16 October. www.weiqing120. com/a/201710/20171016422173.html (accessed 28 February 2018). Wu, Guo. 2014. ‘Speaking Bitterness: Political Education in Land Reform and Military Training Under the CCP, 1947–1951’. The Chinese Historical Review 21 (1): 3–23. Xiao, Hui. 2014. Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Xiao, Suowei. 2011. ‘The “Second-­Wife” Phenomenon and the Relational Construction of Class-­Coded Masculinities in Contemporary China’. Men & Masculinities 14 (5): 607–627. doi:10.1177/1097184X11412171.

Part II

Rural–urban inequality

5 ‘Phoenix men’ Changing representations of urban– rural marriages in contemporary China Guoqing Zheng

In 2017, an anti-­corruption ‘mainstream melody’ (zhuxuanlü)1 television show, In the Name of the People, captivated the attention of a large Chinese audience with its extensive exposure of the corruption and power struggles within the government. The character of the main ‘villain’ in the show, Qi Tongwei, Director of the Provincial Public Security Bureau, triggered particularly heated debates among Chinese netizens. Despite the moral denunciation Qi received in the show, many netizens expressed understanding and sympathy for this character. Some even became loyal fans of Xu Yajun, the actor who played Qi. When discussing Qi’s fate, netizens repeatedly referred to him as a ‘phoenix man’ (fenghuang nan), by which they meant he was a man with high ambition yet bad luck. Gao Jialin, another important Chinese literary and subsequently movie character of the 1980s created by Lu Yao in his well-­known novella Life (Rensheng, 1982), was also frequently mentioned in the discussions about Qi Tongwei. An ambitious rural young man, Gao was even referred to as ‘the first phoenix man’ in contemporary China. The term ‘phoenix man’ owes its origins to the Chinese folk saying, ‘a golden phoenix flying from the rural mountains’. The term was formally documented in New Chinese Words in 2007 (2007nian hanyu xinciyu), compiled by the State Language Commission. The commission states that it describes ‘a well-­educated and talented man who comes from a rural family, particularly a man who is married to a city girl and encounters various problems in romance, marriage, and family due to his rural background’ (State Language Commission of China 2008, p. 50). The term ‘phoenix man’ first emerged in online discussions about two hit television dramas: New Age of Marriage (Xinjiehun shidai, 2006–2007) and Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape (Shuangmianjiao, 2007). The term later spread from the internet to the mass media and has become a catchphrase in popular culture. In the mass media’s use of the term, a phoenix man must satisfy at least two criteria: (1) he must move from the countryside to the city by means of education, especially by passing a college entrance examination and undertaking higher education in the city; and (2) he must marry an urban woman. A less rigid definition of phoenix man, however, includes anyone of humble origins, not necessarily from the countryside. For example, Li Yaping, the male protagonist in Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape, was born to parents who work for a state-­owned

84   Guoqing Zheng factory in a small town in Northeast China. Technically speaking, Li is not a boy from the countryside. Yet he is still viewed as a phoenix man on the basis that he is a low-­class outsider who tries to make his way in the city. Gao Jialin does not fit the category of phoenix man either, for he has neither gone to college nor married an urban woman. Nevertheless, he has been intuitively associated with the derogatory term by the general public due to the fact that he ardently desires an urban lifestyle. To achieve this goal, he abandons his rural girlfriend (Liu Qiaozhen) and starts a relationship with an urban woman (Huang Yaping). Gao’s struggle to pursue an urban life in order to change his destiny is consistent with the behaviour of a phoenix man, even though Gao is forced to return to the countryside when his endeavours fail. Yet, as these television shows have demonstrated, those phoenix men who succeed in settling in the city and marrying a city girl do not necessarily live happily ever after. The stigmatizing catchphrase inadvertently exposes issues of class segregation and social identity and points to the crossing of class boundaries caused by the growing gaps in China between rich and poor, the urban and the rural.

‘Defeating heaven by a half point’: class solidification and the urban–rural divide Those who have watched In the Name of the People may well remember A Game with Heaven (Tianju), Qi Tongwei’s favourite novella. In order to dramatize Qi’s personality, the show presents a scene in which Qi passionately recites to his mistress the ending of A Game with Heaven. This scene occurs at the moment Qi faces a critical turning point in his life: Everyone climbed to where the teacher was standing but couldn’t figure out why his expression looked so strange. They asked him, ‘What do you see? What is Hundun doing?’ The teacher replied, ‘Playing Go.’ ‘In this wildness among the mountains? Who is he playing against?’ The teacher remained silent. After a long pause, he spoke one word, ‘Heaven!’ Being nonprofessionals, the crowd eagerly asked, ‘Did he win?’ The teacher started to count the points carefully. When he came to the bottom-­ right corner of the ‘board,’ he saw the ko that decided the outcome of the game. Hundun, kneeling at the very corner, used himself as a black stone and won the game through a ko fight. Impressed and touched by Hundun’s passion for the game, the teacher, with his fists clenched high in the air, cried out, ‘He defeated Heaven by a half point!’ His words soared through the mountains, shaking the forests as they passed. (Jiao 2004, p. 82) Written by Jiao Jian, a contemporary Chinese author, A Game with Heaven tells the story of a rural Go-­lover nicknamed ‘Hundun’, literally meaning

‘Phoenix men’   85 ‘chaos’. Hundun is so devoted to the game that at the end of the story he uses himself as a stone (piece) to fight his imaginary opponent in the wild. He subsequently dies on the ‘board’. The screenwriter Zhou Meisen introduces this story into the television show to emphasize Qi’s resolution to single-­handedly change his fate and ‘defeat Heaven by a half point’, whatever the cost. In the show, Qi’s opponent, Hou Liangping, the Director of the Anti-­ Corruption Bureau, has long suspected Qi of involvement in extensive corruption and abuse of power. In order to read Qi’s mind, Hou reads A Game with Heaven thoroughly and even jots down notes at its climax when the hero is ‘defeating Heaven by half a point’. When explaining his suspicions about Qi to the Procuror-­General, Ji Changping, Hou scornfully claims that, being a poor peasant’s son, Qi is no better than Julien Sorel, the protagonist of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir. Hou argues that, like Julien Sorel, Qi uses women to help him climb the social ladder. He suggests that Qi does not mind getting down on his knees to ask for the hand of his former teacher (Liang Lu) because she is the daughter of a high-­ranking cadre. In fact, Qi rejects Liang when he is a graduate student because he already has a girlfriend (one of his classmates at college). He later suffers reprisals from Liang’s influential father. After his graduation Qi is sent to work at a judicial office in a remote rural area, despite his outstanding academic record at school. In order to change his depressing life in the rural area, Qi decides to join the anti-­drug brigade. After being shot three times during an operation, he becomes an ‘anti-­drug hero’. Even so, he still cannot get transferred to the city to reunite with his beloved college girlfriend. Realizing that he is hampered by his humble origins, Qi finally abandons his girlfriend, relinquishes his pride and proposes to Liang. After that, he moves to the city and begins his distorted and greedy pursuit of power. Public sympathy for Qi is set against a growing anxiety about the solidification of boundaries between social classes. With the workplace crowded with the children of wealthy businessmen and government officials, second generation peasants such as Qi have few resources they can use to achieve their ambition of ‘defeating Heaven by half a point’. The popularity of phrases that begin with ‘the second generation of ’ in recent years signals the inheritance of social status and the formation of a social structure in which the highest class get all the rewards, cross-­class mobility is restricted and resources are increasingly controlled by the elite. This oppressive social reality is vividly depicted in an online article titled ‘No More Successful Sons from Poor Families’ (Hanmen zai nan chu guizi) that went viral in 2013 (Huihui Gaogao 2013). The author of the article claims to be a human resources manager in a bank. Based on his observations of the performance and development of several college students who had worked in his bank as interns, the author notes that family background had a powerful impact on the interns’ career paths. The writer argues that students from different family backgrounds (government officials, businessmen, intellectuals and farmers) displayed different behavioural patterns and communication styles. In addition, their

86   Guoqing Zheng parents’ and relatives’ professions and social status tended to provide access to different social networks. All these factors determined the social positions those students could reach when entering the workplace. Among the student interns, the writer shows particular sympathy for a boy called Zhiguo, who came from the countryside. Zhiguo studied hard at school and worked hard as an intern. However, some of Zhiguo’s behaviours led the head of his department to reject his application to become a full-­time employee. ‘The city I live in, the bank I work at, and the reality I see all suggest that social stratification is solidifying: the rich are becoming richer, while the poor remain poor,’ the author wrote. This sense of powerlessness and anxiety was echoed by the voices expressing sympathy for Qi’s tragic fate. The restoration of the National College Entrance Examination (gaokao) in the late 1970s provided rural young people with an opportunity to be admitted into universities and thereby change their life paths. However, reforms since the mid-­ 1990s have led to a re-­concentration of social resources and a gradual slowdown in class mobility, motivated by the diffusion of resources in the 1980s (Sun 2003). On the one hand, the proletarianization of college graduates has been demonstrated by the rise of ‘ant tribes’, a term coined by scholar Lian (2009) to refer to low-­income college graduates who congregate in low-­rent districts like ants. On the other hand, the proportion of rural students admitted to prestigious universities is declining. In order to afford an urban life, a large number of rural senior high school students are forced to become migrant workers (nongmin gong). Like migratory birds, these workers constantly move between urban and rural areas. At one end of the route is the depressed rural areas they no longer wish to return to; at the other end is the city, where their labour is exploited for the city’s development, yet they are excluded from the labour protection and welfare benefits enjoyed by urban residents. The urban–rural division caused by the household registration system (hukou) and the consequent inequality between urban and rural residents has served as a unique element of class structure in China. From the late 1950s, China implemented the hukou system, which strictly controls rural-­to-urban migration. Under this system, urban and rural residents are provided with different resources, including differential access to provisions, employment opportunities, educational opportunities, public infrastructure and social welfare. Although peasants were appointed ‘the masters of the country’ and granted a superior symbolic status during the socialist era, a series of institutional arrangements centred around the hukou system since the 1950s has instead divided citizens into two distinct and unequal social identities: urban residents and rural residents. State control of rural-­to-urban migration began to ease from the 1980s, providing a prerequisite for the existence of migrant workers. Despite this, the unequal institutional arrangements have hardly improved and the gap between urban and rural citizens continues to be prominent. To make things worse, the urban–rural divide has constituted the basis for social re-­stratification and discrimination in contemporary Chinese society. Twenty-­first century peasants not only have worse physical living conditions than other classes, but they have also lost the

‘Phoenix men’   87 glory enjoyed by the working class in socialist revolutionary discourse. In the discursive apparatus of modernity, ‘peasant’ has become a synonym for backwardness, uncivilized behaviours and low quality. Therefore, being born in a rural area has become the ‘original sin’ of the phoenix man. In the novella Life, Gao Jialin is humiliated as a ‘bumpkin’ by city people when he goes to collect human faeces to use as fertilizer. Staring at the brightly-­ lit city, Gao, a high school student at the time, vows to himself, ‘I will come and live here! I am educated, and I have knowledge. Which part of me is worse than the young people living here?’ (Lu 2009, p. 109). Gao believes that he is as well­educated as the urban residents. He does not understand why he is bound to a life in a rural area and denied access to an urban life. When he started work in the rural judicial office, Qi Tongwei must have had the same thoughts as Gao. Both Gao and Qi are eager to change their destiny. However, both men appear to have accepted their ‘disadvantaged’ background. Although they are dissatisfied, neither of them questions the legitimacy of the hukou system that is the cause of their lives of misery. Back in the 1980s, Lu Yao, the author of Life, summed up Gao’s difficulties with the question, ‘What kind of life paths should the younger generation take?’. Most of the critical discussions about the novella at that time centred on this question. Gao was criticized for abandoning his responsibilities to the land and to his former girlfriend, Liu Qiaozhen, who epitomizes true rural values such as simplicity and honesty. At the end of the novella, Lu Yao includes a scene where Deshun, a 70-year-­old peasant, lectures Gao about the importance of loving the land and hard work: I heard that you’d come back this morning, so I came to wait for you here, as I want to speak with you. You should put your heart in the right place from now on! You should never look down upon the rural mountains and land. These mountains, this river, and this land are what nurture us, generation after generation. Without this land, there would be nothing in this world! I mean ‘nothing’! As long as we love hard work, everything will improve. (Lu 2009, p. 212) Nevertheless, as critic Li Jie pointed out, Gao’s problem is not whether he should return to the land (his patch of countryside), but rather, whether he should enjoy the same civil rights as urban youth (Li 1985). Since ‘the land not only nurtures “us”, but also nurtures everyone living in the world’, Li Jie writes, everyone should go back to the land. ‘Why only Gao? The reason is none other than the fact that Gao’s father is a peasant!’ (Li 1985, p  68). While Li Jie believes that ‘anyone, regardless of family background, social status and starting point in life, has the right to pursue a better life’, he also argues that Gao’s tragedy lies in the norms associated with this pursuit (Li 1985, p. 68). In the course of pursuing a better life and higher social status, people like Gao come in contact with power and begin to abuse it. Some even become the power itself,

88   Guoqing Zheng although it was the source of their previous oppression. Qi’s life path is no different and eventually that path costs him his life. In the cases of Gao and Qi, their individual struggles neither challenge nor change the unjust social structure that defines their fates in the first place.

Phoenix men as ‘urban locusts’ Public sympathy for Qi along with class resentment have proved to be easily converted into an urban middle class contempt for ‘phoenix men’ and fear of these ‘invaders’. Two well-­known television shows, New Age of Marriage and Double-­ Sided Adhesive Tape, have used the image of the phoenix man as a vehicle to represent class and emotional conflicts between urban and rural residents. Both shows were written by famous Chinese novelists and screenwriters that specialize in romance and family relationships. Wang Hailing, the author of New Age of Marriage (2006), is a leading screenwriter of family dramas. She has turned a number of her novels into successful television dramas, including Loving You is Non-­ Negotiable (Aini meishangliang, 1992), Holding Hands (Qianshou, 1999) and The Chinese Style Divorce (Zhongguoshi lihun, 2004). Liu Liu, also known as Zhang Xin, earned her fame as a screenwriter through Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape, adapted from her own eponymous novel published in 2005. The popularity of Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape, as well as her later works such as Wanggui and Anna (Wanggui yu Anna, 2009) and Dwelling Narrowness (Woju, 2009), has made Liu Liu one of the top television writers in China. Both writers excel at grasping the major conflicts in contemporary Chinese marriages, such as men keeping mistresses, purchasing houses and dealing with relationships with the in-­laws. In addition, both writers are skilled at using these conflicts to create eventful and exciting stories that connect emotionally with their audiences. Both New Age of Marriage and Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape focus on the marital discords and conflicts between a rural man and an urban woman. The tedious yet frequent disagreements and disputes in daily life eventually exhaust the couple’s love for one another, leading to a failed marriage. By proving correct the old Chinese saying that ‘the couple’s background should match for a marriage to be successful’, the two shows teach a valuable lesson to millions of young viewers. Coincidentally, the heroines of both shows work as editors in cultural businesses. Portrayed as ‘cultivated people’, the shows suggest the women should be able to ignore social prejudices and follow their hearts in matters of love. The two men they choose to marry are both from low status families and receive college educations in the city. However, the main purpose of the shows is not to eulogize cross-­class romance, but to emphasize the price of such romance, as both heroines have to cope with the husbands’ humble families that eventually destroy their marriages. Hence, the two shows reinforce the traditional concept of ‘a matched marriage’ and point to family origin as the root cause of the heroines’ misfortune in marriage. Specifically, the families of both husbands are depicted as ‘vampires’ that feed on urban women’s emotions and love, constantly ‘swindling’ and ‘extorting’

‘Phoenix men’   89 resources from the heroines’ families. In New Age of Marriage (Wang 2006), the hero He Jianguo’s peasant father is very vain but has few social skills. He’s father likes to boast to fellow villagers that his son has married a Beijing girl. From time to time, he takes fellow villagers to the hospital where his daughter-­in-law’s mother works as surgeon-­in-chief, asking her to make favourable arrangements so that his fellow villagers can receive better service and treatment. When a truck from the village is detained by the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau for carrying passengers illegally, He Jianguo claims to be the person to solve the problem, as he is ‘the only Beijinger’ in the village. Considering the ‘mianzi’ (face) and practical benefits to He’s family (the truck owner’s brother is chairman of the village committee), He’s wife, Gu Xiaoxi, goes to the checking station to settle the issue in the cold, even though she has just had a miscarriage. Other problems that require financial support from the couple, such as building a house and relocating graves in He’s hometown, also become a source of constant dispute in their daily life. The funeral of the grandfather of He’s sister-­in-law turns out to be the final straw in their marriage. He asks Gu to go back to the village with him in order to maintain his family’s ‘mianzi’. Initially, Gu refuses. However, she is not able to resist the repeated pleas of her husband. ‘A tree lives because of the skin, and a man lives to save his face,’ the husband says, ‘The villagers have nothing. If they can’t maintain face, what’s the meaning of their life? I ask you to be there so that they can feel honoured’ (Wang 2006, p. 261). Gu goes to He’s hometown to attend the funeral of a stranger, while her mother dies in the operating theatre, after finishing a long and stressful operation. When Gu returns to Beijing, she is ‘greeted’ by her mother’s cold body in the morgue. By then, the physically and mentally exhausted Gu can no longer tolerate marriage with He and demands a divorce. The vain and inconsiderate father-­in-law in New Age of Marriage is replaced in Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape by a mean and vicious mother-­in-law.2 From its opening, Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape (Liu 2005) centres on the conflicts between Hu Lijuan, a Shanghai girl, and her mother-­in-law, caused by their different lifestyles and consumption habits. As soon as the mother-­in-law arrives at the young couple’s apartment in Shanghai, the down-­payment of which is paid by Hu’s family, she is dissatisfied with the ‘impractical’ way the apartment is decorated and begins to refurnish the entire place. For example, she replaces the exquisite linen tablecloth Hu has carefully selected with a disposable plastic tablecloth, believing that the linen tablecloth should only be used when the couple have guests. She also replaces the famous Western oil painting ‘The Bathers’ (Les Grandes Baigneuses) with a festive calendar, as she thinks hanging naked women on the wall is improper. Before Li Yaping’s parents leave, the young couple offer to show them around Shanghai. After visiting the cosmetics section of a large shopping mall, the mother-­in-law feigns dizziness and urges everyone to go home, as she notices that the Clinique Night Cream on Hu’s nightstand costs more than 300 yuan and is afraid that Hu will make expensive purchases again if the family stays in the shopping mall any longer. No one knows what has really happened apart from Hu. Having experienced socialist

90   Guoqing Zheng destitution, the mother-­in-law values frugality and believes in the old saying that ‘when taken care of properly, clothes can remain new for three years, be worn for three more years when they get old, and another three years after patching and repairing’. By contrast, Hu grew up in the reform era and is influenced by capitalist consumer culture. Each day that Hu and her mother-­in-law spend together is a battle between the habits and mentality of the old and the new times. Hu cannot understand why her mother-­in-law does not allow her to spend her own money at will, which Hu feels is reducing her ‘quality of life’. Money is undoubtedly the major cause of conflict between the two families. Li Yaping comes from a working-­class family. When the young couple plan to buy an apartment for their marriage, Li’s parents are only able to give him the meagre amount of 20,000 yuan. When Li’s brother-­in-law is forced to choose between raising funds for the factory he works at and facing unemployment, and when Li’s father is diagnosed with lung cancer and needs a large sum of money to cover medical costs, Li has to rely on the financial support of Hu’s family. The social problems of laid-­off workers in Northeast China and the under-­ developed universal healthcare system experienced by Li’s family are transferred to Hu’s family and become their personal burden. Eventually Hu demands a divorce and asks Li and his mother to move out of her apartment. She threatens to sue Li’s sister for the money that she owes her. Li becomes furious and begins to beat Hu. In the original novel, instead of stopping him, Li’s mother encourages his behaviour, shouting ‘Harder! Beat her to death! Don’t stop until she’s done! Beat the bitch! Beat her to death!’. And Li does indeed beat Hu to death (Liu 2005, p. 237). The television show, however, offers a less bleak ending. When Li starts to beat Hu, their son gets scared and falls down the stairs. The family immediately take the boy to hospital. While the doctors are fighting to save the child’s life, Li’s mother agrees to move out of the couple’s apartment. In the end, Li and Hu terminate their marriage amicably. A year later, Hu takes their son to hospital to visit Li’s dying mother. It is unclear whether Li and Hu will get back together. According to an online article (Xiaowugui de Bagua Jidi 2017), Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape was inspired by a true story. A Shanghai girl named Wu Lijun married a phoenix man. The husband’s family wanted her family to buy an apartment for the husband’s younger brother and was unhappy about the fact that Wu gave birth to a daughter rather than a son. Wu was later strangled to death by the husband during one of their many fights. When Wu’s parents heard about her death, the father had a heart attack and soon passed away. The mother was unable to handle the loss and suffered continuous mental illness afterwards. When she was writing Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape, Liu Liu interviewed Wu’s neighbours and her husband in jail. The editor of the online article narrates the prison visit in sensational tones: Liu Liu recalled that ‘the murderer looked at us and grinned. He said that he married a Shanghai woman so that his family could get out of poverty. Since his parents-­in-law refused to support his family financially, what good was

‘Phoenix men’   91 the Shanghai wife?’ Liu Liu felt chills going down her spine when she heard those words. I am also shocked! For many women, getting married is like being reborn. For all the girls who want to get married, please open your eyes and don’t choose those evil-­intentioned phoenix men! (Xiaowugui de Bagua Jidi 2017) Although the authenticity of the article is hard to verify, its account and those of numerous other similar cases on the internet have condemned phoenix men. They are represented as a horrible means by which the rural underclass can invade and plunder the city. The stigmatization of phoenix men in shows like New Age of Marriage and Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape makes use of such public emotions to both reflect the increasing social segregation and class distinction in Chinese society and to warn urban middle class viewers of the danger of letting ‘outsiders’ encroach on urban resources.

Women, fertility and traditional patriarchy New Age of Marriage and Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape can be seen as representations of urban–rural marriages from the perspective of urban middle class women who believe themselves to be socially superior to rural men. However, the phenomenon of ‘mis-­matched’ marriages is not the only reason that the shows have attracted a large female audience. The two shows also express women’s discontent with the traditional rural patriarchal system. The male protagonists of the two shows are both responsible and considerate husbands. They are willing to do housework and know how to compromise and entertain their wives. Their marital problems seem to derive solely from the negative influence of their birth families: the conservative gender norms imposed by rural patriarchy in the case of New Age of Marriage and the financial troubles of the husband’s family in the case of Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape. In New Age of Marriage, the heroine, Gu Xiaoxi, is unwilling to return with her husband He Jianguo to his hometown during the Spring Festival, due partly to the poor living conditions in the countryside. But the main reason is that people in He’s hometown show little respect towards and scarcely any care of women. Gu is in the early months of pregnancy during one Spring Festival trip to He’s hometown. He’s sister-­in-law is also pregnant at that time and is only days away from her expected due date. Despite this, the sister-­in-law is still expected to attend to guests and do all the housework. Gu has to follow her example and be her assistant. According to local custom, women are not allowed to eat at the same table as men and have to wait until the men have finished their meals. Hence, quite aside from the lack of any extra care during her early pregnancy, Gu does not even get a proper warm meal. To add ‘face’ to his family, He rents a car and drives all the way to his hometown. On their way back to the city, the rental car gets stuck in a ditch. Gu has to get out and help He push the car in the cold wind. This causes her to have a miscarriage.

92   Guoqing Zheng The scene of Gu’s miscarriage while pushing the car is repeated in flashback in the show. As well as functioning as a melodramatic technique to create tension and to highlight the miserable life of an urban woman married to a rural man, this scene also reveals a hidden problem in He and Gu’s marriage. The fact that Gu has several miscarriages and is unable to bear a child becomes critical to the marital relationship. Although He accepts that he and Gu may never have children, as a son, he is unable to resist the desire for a grandson from his rural family, especially his father, who even suggests that if Gu is unable to bear a child, He should divorce her. For this reason, the couple have to hide information about Gu’s recurrent miscarriages from He’s father. In the end, Gu asks for a divorce, not only because she is disappointed with He’s handling of all the disputes and conflicts, but because she is unable to withstand the family pressure caused by her miscarriages. The show’s writer designs a happy ending for the couple: He’s elder brother manages to talk some sense into He’s father, who eventually gives up his expectation for a grandson and approves He’s remarriage to Gu. The show ends with an on-­screen statement, ‘After a year, Gu gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl.’ Hence, the modern nuclear family’s need for intimacy and the traditional extended family’s expectation that couples will carry on the family line are both satisfied. In Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape, patriarchal thinking is embodied in Li Yaping’s mother, who has deeply internalized traditional concepts of gender roles. Li’s mother’s greatest worry is that Li, under the influence of Shanghai men, has spoiled his wife and stopped behaving like a traditionally macho northeastern man. The mother strongly believes that ‘a man should be worshiped at home, not treated like a servant’. One evening, Li’s mother cooks stewed pork for dinner. However, when Li tells her that he will not be coming back for dinner, she immediately turns off the stove. When Hu Lijuan returns home, Li’s mother tells her that since there is nobody at home, she is going to skip cooking dinner. She then takes out the leftovers from the previous day and lays them out for Hu: Lijuan sneered and thought, what do you mean by ‘nobody at home’? Am I not counted? Are you not counted? Why is it that your son is the only one that is counted? Then she remembered that Yaping used to tell her a joke about the low social status of women in his hometown. He said that if there was no male member at home and someone knocked at the door, the female member was supposed to answer, ‘Nobody’s at home!’ It sounded funny at that time. Now that she became a ‘nobody,’ it didn’t feel funny at all. (Liu 2005, pp. 25–26) However, when Hu is pregnant, Li’s mother becomes an entirely different person and takes great care of her. The reason behind this change of behaviour is that Hu is carrying Li and his family’s descendant. As soon as Hu has a miscarriage, Li’s mother packs her luggage and goes back to her hometown, leaving Hu unattended. Li’s father is later diagnosed with lung cancer. In order to ensure

‘Phoenix men’   93 that his father has a grandchild and dies with no regrets, Li tries very hard to fix his relationship with Hu and gets her pregnant for the second time. Instead of being the fruit of conjugal love, the child is a product of filial piety. After the child is born, he becomes the focus of a new round of battles between Hu and Li’s mother. To have complete control of the child, Li’s mother throws away Hu’s breast milk after Hu goes to work and replaces it with milk powder. She also attempts to minimize Hu’s contact with the child. One day, when Hu is trying to teach the six-­month-old child to pronounce ‘mama’ (mum), Hu notices that the child always adds the word huai (bad). When the child pronounces the words together, Hu realizes that, thanks to her mother-­in-law’s coaching, he is actually saying ‘mama huai’, meaning ‘mum is bad’. At that moment, Hu breaks down and tells the mother-­in-law to get out of her apartment. Refusing to let his mother go, Li starts to beat Hu furiously. After this violent fight, Hu and Li separate for a year and do not see each other again until Li’s mother is about to pass away. In her study of the gender dimension of urban romance in Chinese television series, Shuyu Kong suggests that the word ‘romance’ is actually misleading, as the majority of urban romances are associated with the unromantic marriages and relationships of urban Chinese women. These women are faced with the conflict between family and work and the difference between new and old standards of what it means to be ‘a good woman’, as well as the chaotic ethical and moral system generated by the transformation of society. Written predominantly by women, these shows reveal valuable viewpoints from a female perspective. Kong (2008, p. 80) argues that ‘[t]hese urban romances are particularly successful in capturing the inner emotional world of the female characters with great sympathy and sensitivity’. Although New Age of Marriage and Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape do not foreground the emotional world of female characters, both shows still portray the negative impact on modern marriage and family of traditional gender roles and attitudes towards fertility. The tension between the traditional expectations of women as tools for reproduction and their enhanced subjectivity in modern intimate relationships constitutes the major ambivalences and conflicts of this ‘new age of marriage’.

Conclusion Most of the active participants in online discussions of phoenix men are urban women.3 The topics discussed most frequently are either debates about whether an urban woman should marry a phoenix man or complaints about negative experiences of being married to a phoenix man. Occasionally, participants express sympathy for phoenix men and even defend them. Yet such posts are often met with personal attacks: ‘I bet you are a phoenix man, right? Get back to your countryside!’. Given the negative attitudes towards them, how do rural college students who are labelled ‘phoenix men’ view their situation in the city? In the novel version of New Age of Marriage, He Jianguo is confronted with discrimination towards the rural population from the moment he enters college

94   Guoqing Zheng in Beijing. For example, students from rural areas are always the first suspects whenever anything goes missing from the dormitory. Similarly, when Gu Xiaoxi’s younger brother discovers that money is missing from the house, the housemaid that He introduced from his hometown becomes the prime suspect. Faced with this prejudice, discrimination and verbal violence aimed at the rural population, He Jianguo chooses to remain silent, as speaking up generally backfires: He never spoke out if he knew that his words made no difference. Sometimes, speaking up may lead to other side effects, as he would be considered to have an ‘inferiority complex’. As a rural boy that ended up in a big city, even if you don’t feel inferior to others, you’d be labeled so anyway. Once you are labeled as having an ‘inferiority complex,’ it no longer matters if you feel angry or sad, as it’s never others’ fault; your over-­sensitivity is the only one to blame. This is their situation. (Wang 2006, p. 12) Remaining silent is the strategy the novelist appears to be suggesting phoenix men adopt in the face of unequal treatment. In 2010, scholar and writer Liang Hong published a very successful collection of essays, entitled China in Liang Village (Zhongguo zai Liangzhuang), which illustrated the influence of urbanization on her hometown, a rural village named ‘Liang’ in Henan Province. Liang then published a second book, Leaving Liang Village (Chu Liangzhuang ji). Based on oral interviews, this book recounts the lives of the villagers after they leave Liang village and migrate to the city. One chapter of the book is entitled ‘The Phoenix Man’ and the interviewee, Liang Dong, is a college graduate who had been working in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, for four years. Keenly aware of the social reality and of his own situation, Liang Dong reluctantly accepts the label ‘phoenix man’ given by the mass media: My relationship is a typical relationship between a phoenix man and an urban woman. In the old days, if a golden phoenix was able to fly over the rural mountains, he would be valued and young girls’ parents would rush to marry their daughters to him. The current situation is different. Now, being a phoenix man sucks. Look at how those TV shows, such as Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape and New Age of Marriage, have ruined our reputation. Who would dare to marry their daughter to such a guy? Watching those shows makes me want to smash the TV. Are rural people this bad? This is complete vilification and purposeful creation of social antagonism. (Liang 2013, p. 200) Compared to phoenix men, migrant workers and peasants have suffered a longer history of stigmatization and discrimination. Due to the urban–rural divide brought about by the hukou system, the social class of ‘peasant’ has become the greatest victim of China’s modernizing process. During the era of the planned economy, the government used the price differential between industrial and

‘Phoenix men’   95 a­ gricultural products to drain rural resources. With the reductions in the prices of agricultural products since the mid-­1990s, peasants’ earnings now barely cover their needs for food and clothing. As a result, a large number of peasants are forced to work in the cities and have become the labour backbone of China’s rapid urbanization. During the socialist period peasants made heavy sacrifices in the interests of the industrialization of the country, but in that era they were at least rewarded with positive evaluations in official discourse. In literary works of the socialist era, such as Between a Couple (Women fufu zhijian, 1950), Sentinels under the Neon Lights (Nihong dengxia de shaobing, 1963) and Make Sure Not to Forget (Qianwan buyao wangji, 1964), the simplicity and morality of peasants were portrayed as natural shields against the eroding force of the bourgeois lifestyle. In Liu Qing’s novel The Builders (Chuangye shi, 1959), when the hero Liang Shengbao goes to the city to buy paddy seeds, he is not ashamed to eat the cheapest food under the contemptuous stares of urban bystanders because every penny he saves is associated with the lofty cause of achieving socialist undertakings and creating a communist nation. From the 1980s, however, the glorious image of peasants created by left-­wing literature and culture began to decline. Gao Xiaosheng’s short story ‘Chen Huansheng Went to the City’ (Chen huanshen shangcheng, 1980) revived the image of the comedic characterization of ‘country bumpkin’ in Chinese literature, which was once vividly depicted in the classic novel A Dream of Red Mansions through the character Granny Liu. But if the attitudes of urban people in Gao’s story could still be seen as friendly teasing in 1980, since the 1990s the portrayal of peasants and migrant workers in skits performed by Zhao Benshan and in films starring Wang Baoqiang have demoted these characters to laughing stock. The urban–rural divide is thus not only reflected in China’s social and economic structures but is now also reproduced in cultural products. The ideology of the ‘New Enlightenment’ represents the urban–rural divide as part of ‘the conflicts between civilization and ignorance’ that were heralded by the ‘new era’ of the 1980s and have expanded even further since the 1990s under the impact of globalization and neoliberalism.4 As long as the urban–rural divide exists, peasants are bound to be the ‘others’ of urban civilization. Nonetheless, as we shall also see in Yanwen Li’s analysis of the social imagination of rural domestic servants in urban middle class homes (Chapter 6), ‘others’ are also the subject of desires, passions and actions. From migrant workers and maids to phoenix men, the crossing and policing of boundaries will therefore continue to generate stories of urban–rural conflict in contemporary China.

Notes 1 Due to the crisis of legitimacy in the wake of Tiananmen protests in 1989, the Chinese government has, since the 1990s, stepped up its efforts to promote socialist ideology and to encourage the production of what are referred to as ‘mainstream melody’, i.e. literary and cultural works that are in line with the official ideology.

96   Guoqing Zheng 2 The actress who plays Li’s mother was previously famous for her role as the number one villain, the vicious Wet-­Nurse Rong, in My Fair Princess, or Return of the Pearl Princess (Huanzhu gege), a Chinese–Taiwanese television show that was popular in East and Southeast Asia in the 1990s. 3 Information on these online discussions was collected principally from Baidu Tieba and Douban.com. See Chapter 7 for further details about Baidu Tieba. 4 The quotation is from Ji Hongzhen, a famous literary critic of the 1980s (Ji 2006). Ji believes that the conflict between civilization and ignorance constitutes the basic theme of literature in the new era. Considered a representative text of the cultural trends of the 1980s, Ji’s article ‘The Conflict between Civilization and Ignorance: On the Basic Themes of Novels in the New Era’ (Wenming yu yumei de chongtu: lun xinshiqi xiaoshuo de jiben zhuti) was included in the volume The Cultural Consciousness of Contemporary China (Zhongguo dangdai wenhua yishi) edited by Gan Yang, which aims to summarize the ‘New Enlightenment’ in China.

References Huihui Gaogao. 2013. ‘Hanmen zainan chu guizi’ [No More Successful Sons from Poor Families], 15 July. http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-­free-3482555-1.shtml (accessed 25 April 2018). Ji, Hongzhen. 2006. ‘Wenming yu yumei de chongtu: lun xinshiqi xiaoshuo de jiben zhuti’ [The Conflict between Civilization and Ignorance: On the Basic Themes of Novels in the New Era]. In: Bashi niandai wenhua yishi [The Cultural Consciousness of the 1980s], edited by Gan Yang. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, pp. 120–183. Jiao, Jian. 2004. ‘Tianju’ [A Game with Heaven]. In: Jiao Jian zhongduanpian xiaoshuoji [Collection of Jiao Jian’s Short Stories and Novellas]. Jinan: Shandong wenyi chubanshe, pp. 73–82. Kong, Shuyu. 2008. ‘Family Matters: Reconstructing the Family on the Chinese Television Screen’. In: TV Drama in China, edited by Ying Zhu, Michael Keane and Ruoyun Bai. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 75–88. Li, Jie. 1985. ‘Gao Jialin lun’ [On Gao Jialin]. Dangdai zuojia pinglun [Contemporary Writers Review] 1: 67–75. Lian, Si. 2009. Yizu: Daxue biyesheng jijucun shilu [The Ant Tribe: A True Record of the Agglomerated Settlement of College Graduates]. Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press. Liang, Hong. 2013. Chu Liangzhuang Ji [Leaving Liang Village]. Guangzhou: Huacheng chuban she. Liu, Liu. 2005. Shuangmianjiao [Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape]. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House. Lu, Yao. 2009. Rensheng [Life]. Beijing: Beijing shiyue wenyi chubanshe. State Language Commission of China. 2008. 2007nian hanyu xinciyu [New Chinese Words in 2007]. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Sun, Liping. 2003. Duanlie—ershi shiji jiushi niandai yilai de zhongguo shehui [Ruptures: Chinese Society since the 1990s]. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press. Wang, Hailing. 2006. Xinjiehun shidai [New Age of Marriage]. Beijing: The Writers’ Publishing House. Xiaowugui de Bagua Jidi. 2017. ‘Hai jide shuangmianjiao zheju ma? Xiaoshuo you yuanxing, nüzhu cansi fenghuangnan he dupopo shouxia’ [Still Remember the Show Double-­Sided Adhesive Tape? The Novel Is Based on a True Story. The Heroine Suffered a Violent Death from a Phoenix Man and the Evil Mother-­in-Law], 14 March. http://mini.eastday.com/a/170314080042032.html (accessed 25 April 2018).

6 Negotiating class and the rural–urban divide in urban homes Configuring the maid in literature and popular culture Yanwen Li In June 2017, national attention in China was gripped by an arson case in Hangzhou. A nanny, Mo Huanjing, set fire to her employers’ apartment, killing her employer’s wife and three young children. At the trial, the Public Prosecutor in Hangzhou accused Mo of stealing her employers’ valuables and borrowing money from them to cover her heavy gambling debts. Mo confessed that she had planned to put out the fire and then take advantage of her employers’ gratitude to solicit more money (Wang 2018). On 4 June 2018, Mo was sentenced to death by the provincial high court. Although Mo’s gambling, stealing and arson constituted an extremely rare and isolated incident among rural migrant domestic workers, it aroused strong reactions from urban residents. The mass media labelled Mo an ‘evil maid’ and ‘ungrateful villain’ and her behaviours prompted widespread concerns about household security. Two days after the arson attack, an article titled ‘The Poisonous Maid Has Not Gone Far and Here Comes the “Killing Maid”, Who Can Ensure Our Household Security’ appeared on the internet. The sensational article soon garnered over 1,700 comments from netizens. Comments and replies included: ‘Is the devil really by our side?’, ‘How awful. I’d rather break my neck than take in a stranger at home’ and No matter how rich and busy I am, I would never hire a maid. A stranger is like a time bomb that could cost you serious money or even your life. The Chinese domestic service market is full of risk and lacks supervision. (Xinwen Tiejun 2017) Phrases such as ‘the devil by our side’, ‘a stranger at home’ and ‘a time bomb’ all point to unique features of the occupation of domestic worker. As an outsider who enters into urban households, she is what Wanning Sun (2009, p. 2) has aptly dubbed an ‘intimate stranger’ because ‘the relationship between a domestic worker and the urban family she serves is both intimate and distant’. The intimacy refers to the tasks the domestic worker performs in her employer’s home, such as cooking meals, attending to the intimate bodily needs of elderly parents and young children and forming emotional bonds with her employer,

98   Yanwen Li especially the employer’s children (Sun 2009, p. 12). Yet she is still a stranger in her employer’s house because the ‘two factors that are crucial in achieving intimacy are missing: a narrative about sharing, and the sharing of narratives’ (Sun 2009, p.  14). For these reasons ‘the domestic worker is often seen as an intruder on her employers’ privacy, and a threat to their security’ (Sun 2009, p.  15). Speaking from the standpoint of the domestic worker, Sun does not mention that the employers’ fear, anxiety and suspicion arise from the fact that the domestic worker has access to private information about her employers and that she changes employer frequently. Should the domestic worker attempt to use this information against her employers, it is very difficult for them to protect themselves. As a result, the anxiety and fear brought about by the nanny arson case still lingers (Mengduoduo Xiaozhen 2017). Chinese urban families believe they need domestic workers. Yet the socioeconomic status divide between urban employers and rural domestic workers means that neither party can establish an intimate relationship with the other. Their mutual dissatisfaction and mistrust pose a problem for the construction of a ‘harmonious society’, the official vision of Chinese society introduced by former President Hu Jintao in the mid-­2000s. Needless to say, this social problem did not arise in 2017 but has existed since the revival of the occupation of domestic worker in the reform era. This chapter asks: How do works of culture deal with this problem? More specifically, do literary texts and popular culture cover up, disclose or provide imaginary solutions to this problem? Why is the problem so difficult to solve? The chapter offers an analysis of the problem by tracing the representations of rural domestic workers and their desire for intimacy in literary and televisual works since the late 1980s.

Maids in the reform era: dis-­embedding, naming and the desire for intimacy The emergence of the domestic worker in the reform era is due to three factors. First, the rising demand for domestic services in cities. Rapid growth in the private sector led to the emergence of a nouveau riche class. Increasing pressure in the job market meant that urban residents felt an urgent need to enhance their human capital and so became unwilling to spend their time on housework (Yan 2010). Second, the gap between the urban and rural sectors began to grow. When the state shifted its focus of reform to the city from 1985, the income gap between urban and rural residents steadily increased. Meanwhile, the hukou (household registration) system, the root cause of urban–rural disparity, has gradually loosened its grip on peasants, permitting them to look for work in cities (Lu 2005; Pun 2005; Sun 2009). Thus, the formation of the domestic service market in the city and the impoverishment of the countryside are the two external factors that have propelled a large number of rural women to work in the city. A third factor is these rural women’s desires to migrate to the city. Like many other female migrant workers, rural domestic workers are eager to go to the city for reasons ranging from the desire for self-­improvement, independence

Negotiating class and the rural–urban divide   99 and education to the desire to make money, see the world and escape rural patriarchy and rural life, all of which are related to aspirations to modernity (Jacka 2006; Pun 2005). The situation of domestic workers after they enter the city largely depends on how their employers view them. The identity of these workers is tied to the naming, origin and responsibilities of their job. Since the implementation of the reform and opening-­up policy of the late 1970s, the role of domestic worker has evolved into a variety of new occupations with diverse job requirements. Domestic jobs now include live-­in maid (zhujia baomu), hourly domestic helper (xiaoshigong), nursing assistant (hugong), maternity matron (yuesao) and childcare matron (yu’ersao). Domestic workers are usually affiliated with a domestic worker recruitment agency, through which they secure employment opportunities. The National Occupational Standard for Domestic Workers issued by the Ministry of Labour and Social Security in 2000 indicates that the state considers ‘domestic worker’ a modern occupation with ­specific work standards and ethics. The domestic worker is commonly referred to as ‘baomu’ (maid), a term with a long history in China, although many maids prefer to be called ‘jiazheng fuwuyuan’ (domestic worker) or ‘jiazhengong’ for short (Li 1997). During the filming of the television series Maids (Baomu) in 2006, many domestic workers called the production team to protest against the allegedly biased name of the series. The producers also toyed with the possibility of changing the name to ‘domestic workers’. Yet when the show aired in 2007, it retained its original name. The screenwriter Wang Liping explained that ‘maid’ is merely a job title and did not reflect the derogatory meaning assumed by domestic workers (Chen 2006). Although it could be argued that the people who work in a job should have a say in deciding their own job title, in this case the opinions of those working as maids were not taken seriously. A maid’s duty is to take care of her employers’ daily life. In ancient China, this duty was carried out by slave maids. The slave maid was discriminated against and restricted by government rules and social values and treated as her owner’s property. From the perspective of her owner, she was merely a tool that could speak, devoid of either personhood or freedom (Chu 2009, pp. 4–6). The role of baomu in its modern sense appeared as early as the Guangxu reign of the Qing dynasty (1875–1908) (Ruan 2012). Although the Emperor Xuantong issued a law to abolish slaves in 1909 (Chen 1991), trading in slave maids continued in rich families. Consequently, before 1949, the modern employer–employee relationship co-­existed with the traditional master–servant relationship. Due to the influence of the latter, the maid was often referred to as ‘mother of X’ (X ma), ‘servant girl’ (yatou) or ‘maid servant’ (nüyong) and was frequently scolded and beaten by her employers as if she were still a slave. During the Mao era, the socialist belief in equality for all granted more respect to manual labourers, including maids. Since the reform era, however, social class differences and the urban–rural gap have led to a status divide between the rural migrant maid and her urban employers. The resurfacing of social hierarchy has further undermined

100   Yanwen Li the socialist value that all people are created equal. As a result, some employers treat the maid as their inferior and servant (Wang 2007). In his discussion of modernity, Anthony Giddens (1991, p. 18) uses the metaphor of ‘dis-­embedding’ to ‘capture an essential nature and impact of modern institutions—the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts and their rearticulation across indefinite tracts of time-­space’. This drastic lifting out of traditional social support networks is precisely what rural maids have to go through when they move to the city. The dis-­embedded maid, on the one hand, gains freedom from patriarchal families. On the other hand, she is eager for intimacy because of the isolation, suspicion and discrimination she has to endure in the city. I borrow this use of the term intimacy again from Giddens (1992), who argues that intimacy extends beyond the realm of sex and gender—heterosexual or same-­sex romance, marriage, extra-­marital relationship—to encompass the spheres of kinship and friendship. ‘Bad intimacy’ involves violence, coercion and abuse, whereas ‘good intimacy’ or ‘a pure relationship’ is egalitarian, caring and respectful. The intimacy of the maid connects her with both the countryside, where her rural parents or husband reside, and the city, where she establishes sexual relationships and friendships.

Intimacy of the rural–urban maid in literature Literary representations of the maid date from the late 1980s, a time when print literature started to decline as the reading public increasingly turned its attention to various forms of popular culture. Print literature became the internal affair of a small number of writers and critics. Most of these writers presented the maid’s rural family as characterised by ‘bad intimacy’, depicting the patriarchal oppression of the daughter and the sacrifice made by the daughter for her brother(s) under the pressure of parents who believed that women were inferior to men. In Xiang Xiaomi’s novella Erde (2005), Xiaobai’s parents force her to surrender her educational opportunity to her younger brother. In Ge Shuiping’s novella Lianqiao (2006), Xunhong’s father demands that she quit school and shoulder the cost of her younger brother’s education. She is also obliged to build a new house for her brother’s marriage. After her brother is injured, Xunhong is asked to find a live-­in husband to support the whole family. Another aspect of bad intimacy represented in print literature lies in the reversal of the traditional in-­law relationship and the disadvantageous position of the mother-­in-law as a result of social transformations. In Wang Aiguo’s Maid Du Xiaowu (Baomu Du Xiaowu, 2011), Du Xiaowu helps her daughter-­in-law bring up her children. Yet the daughter-­in-law begins to dislike Du because Du’s previous experience as a maid in the city has made her too fussy about hygiene. When bad intimacy in the countryside constitutes a form of deprivation for rural women, the chance to work as a maid in the city is evoked as a way for them to find independence and freedom. Most of the literary works focus on the rural–urban maid’s relationship with her male employers. The maid is often depicted as being raped or seduced by

Negotiating class and the rural–urban divide   101 male employers. One exception is Jia Pingwa’s famous novel Ruined City (Feidu, 1993), which presents the sexual relationship between the male protagonist Zhuang Zhidie and his maid Liu Yue as a romantic affair. However, later works tend to portray such a sexual relationship as dangerous and harmful, as the male employer is shown to take advantage of his maid by using violence and deceit or by exploiting her poverty. In Li Zhaozheng’s The Maid (Nüyong, 2001), the maid Du Xiulan is raped by her male employer when she is asleep. Despite being heartbroken and furious, because of her poverty she accepts his suggestion that she sell her body to him. In Erde, the innocent maid Xiaobai is seduced by her male employer in the name of love. When the truth comes out, Xiaobai vanishes without a trace. In Liu Qingbang’s Maids in Beijing (Baomu zai Beijing) series (2012–2013), male employers either set traps in order to sleep with their maids or sexually molest them. The maids are easily taken in because they desperately need money. While the works mentioned above describe the unfortunate experiences of maids from a male perspective, female writer Li Lan’s Crowds of Maids (Baomu Chengqun, 2011) depicts in detail the internal turmoil maternity matron Dong Xuebing suffers after she is seduced by her male employer and then accused by his wife of seducing her husband. The novel is narrated from the point of view of Dong Xuebing, giving access to her emotions and thoughts. For example: ‘Her self-­esteem was on the verge of collapse. She didn’t know how other people would see her and talk about her. She felt she was really shameless and wanted to kill herself ’ (Li 2011, p. 91). Dong’s gut-­ wrenching fear and intense self-­blame capture the prevalence of victim blaming in Chinese society, which often results in the re-­traumatization of the victim. This novel was the first time in contemporary Chinese literature that the emotional pain suffered by the maid had been vividly depicted from a woman’s point of view. In most literary works, female employers consciously avoid establishing intimacy with maids, contrary to the harmful intimacy male employers inflict on them. In this chapter, I call this distant relationship between the maid and the female employer ‘anti-­intimacy’. In Bi Shumin’s The Purple-­Flowered Cotton Curtain (Zihua Buman, 1989), Xiaoji is hired as a maid by her cousin. To establish her authority, the cousin intentionally ignores the fact that they are relatives. In The Maid, the female employer refers to Du Xiulan as ‘female servant’ (nüyongren), making Du feel deeply humiliated. In Erde, Xiaobai’s female employer blames her for violating her privacy, because Xiaobai sees her when she is putting on her make-­up. The employer also sneers at Xiaobai when she sings out of tune. In her study of the relationship between the maid and the employer, Hairong Yan (2010, p. 135) points out that from the point of view of the employer, emotion is necessary, but needs to be handled and managed with care to ensure that it is not at odds with the employment relationship, not to endanger the commodity nature of this relationship.

102   Yanwen Li Yan’s comment can be used to explain why the female employer portrayed in the aforementioned works keeps her distance from the maid. Since the employment relationship is considered superior to the emotional relationship, to prevent the latter from getting in the way of the former, the employer consciously polices the border between the two parties. The anti-­intimacy behaviours of female employers obviously deepen the loneliness and sense of inferiority of rural– urban maids. A handful of female writers are, however, willing to represent friendship between the female employer and her maid. In these works, the female employers are usually intellectuals who refuse to accept the class and urban– rural boundary between themselves and their maids and are willing to communicate and socialize with maids on an equal basis. Lin Bai’s novel A Record of Women’s Chatting (Funü Xianliao Lu, 2005) is a product of her attentive listening to maid Mu Zhen’s conversation. Haihong, the protagonist in Lin Bai’s Farewell, Home Northwards to Beijing (Beiqu Laici, 2013), is different from most female employers in that she does not scold her maid Yinhe for being unmodern when Yinhe does the housework as it is done in her hometown. Instead, Haihong shows great admiration for Yinhe when the latter fights back against her unreasonable neighbour. In Sun Huifen’s novel Woman Lin Fen and Woman Xiaomi (Nüren Lin Fen yu Nüren Xiaomi, 2000), the female employer Lin Fen and the maid Xiaomi are both divorced women. The similarity of their experiences make Lin Fen feel that the ‘affectionate and warm atmosphere’ between them is like ‘a man and a woman who fall in love at first sight’ and their intimate relationship and behaviours are the equivalent of sisterhood. The bulk of Zhang Kangkang’s novella The Lodger (Jijuzhe, 1997) is made up of dialogue between the female employer Meizi and her maid Zhaodi. This work attempts to reveal two social problems. The first is the way patriarchy makes use of the urban–rural divide to oppress women in the domestic sphere. Zhaodi acquires her servant-­like humility and docility from her family. She is treated like a servant by her husband and son because she does not have an urban hukou. The second is the gender and class division of housework. With the help of Meizi, Zhaodi starts to question whether it is women’s destiny to be maids: ‘Why is it women, rather than men, that do the housework?’, ‘Why must maids be women?’ and ‘Why is the liberation of educated women achieved at the cost of working-­class women?’. This is the only literary work to date that reflects on the relationship between gender and housework, between female intellectuals and maids. However, in all these works female friendship is portrayed as rather fragile. In Woman Lin Fen and Woman Xiaomi, Xiaomi voluntarily leaves when she finds out that Lin Fen has a boyfriend. In The Lodger, Zhaodi is still not strong enough to resist patriarchy even after she has become aware of its implications. When her husband comes to fetch her, she goes back home with him immediately. Apparently, in a heteronormative society, men are shown as having the power to easily terminate a friendship between women.

Negotiating class and the rural–urban divide   103 Some writers also deal with marriages between rural maids and urban men. In this kind of marriage, the urban man is represented as either physically handicapped or troubled by sickness and old age and hence no match for the maid in age and appearance. Such ill-­matched marriages reflect the social status divide between the man and the maid. Liu Yue in Ruined City accepts a marriage arranged by Zhuang Zhidie and marries the handicapped son of the mayor so that she can obtain a city hukou. In Wang Hailing’s New Age of Marriage (Xinjiehun Shidai, 2006), Xiaoxia marries Professor Gu, a man 30 years older who has heart disease, because he promises to allow Xiaoxia’s daughter to go to school in the city and because Professor Gu’s children forgo their right to inherit their father’s property. Since the rural maid exchanges her beauty, youth and health for the relatively better material conditions possessed by the urban man, it is hard to tell whether intimacy plays a role in this exchange-­based marriage. Maid Du Xiaowu describes the emotional loss of such exchange-­based marriages. Du Xiaowu falls in love with Mr Xu when she is taking care of him after he has suffered a stroke. When Mr Xu’s children suggest that they get married but do not allow her to inherit Mr Xu’s property, Xiaowu realizes that Mr Xu does not love her and that she is still a maid in the eyes of the Xu family. Even the most intimate marital relationship is not able to wipe out the socioeconomic gap and dispel Xiaowu’s sense of homelessness and isolation. Sun Huifen’s The Maid (Baomu, 2002) is probably the work that offers the most sober treatment of the status divide between rural maids and urban men. The middle-­aged maid Weng Huizhu falls in love with Teacher Cheng when looking after his wife and is convinced that Cheng also loves her. Yet, after his wife passes away, Cheng marries a female college professor. This outcome sends the message that it is impossible to close the status gap between the rural maid and the urban man.

The intention and narrative focus of maid-­themed television shows The figure of the maid has appeared in many television dramas in the reform era. In the majority of these shows, she is either given a trivial role or is largely invisible, treated like an item of luxury furniture or an electrical appliance owned by rich families. This reflects the maid’s real-­life role in urban families. Nevertheless, there are three television series that feature the maid as the protagonist: Professor Tian and His Twenty-­Eight Maids (Tian Jiaoshou Jiade Ershiba ge Baomu, 1999, hereinafter, Professor Tian), The Maid (Baomu, 2007), and The Maid and the Security Guard (Baomu yu Bao’an, 2010). All three series were hit shows at the time of their screenings. A national sensation, Professor Tian won the Gold Eagle Award, one of the highest honours in Chinese television, awarded on audience votes. It was not only re-­run on various local television stations but followed by a string of copycat series, including Professor Tian and His Twenty-­Eight Tenants (Tian Jiaoshou Jiade Ershiba ge Fangke, 2001) and Professor Tian and His Twenty-­Eight Relatives (Tian Jiaoshou Jiade Ershiba ge Qinqi, 2009). Aired during the Spring Festival, a period when many

104   Yanwen Li maids have left the city to return home, The Maid and The Maid and the Security Guard ignited strong interest in the audience and obtained high viewing rates. These three media products are also intertextually connected, as Professor Tian and The Maid and the Security Guard were both written by the Shanghai screen writer Zhao Huanan, while The Maid and The Maid and the Security Guard were both produced by the Shanghai Blue Star Advertising Company. Hence, The Maid and the Security Guard was also promoted as The Maid II by the producer. No relevant information about the creative intentions of Professor Tian can be found in public discourse, probably because back in 1999 television producers did not invest as much as they do now in self-­promotion. Since the turn of the century, there have been more media reports about television shows before and during their screening. It has also become a common practice for producers to explain their creative process. Wang Liping, the screenwriter of The Maid, once commented that the most difficult part of her writing is the moral stance, as she aims to speak on behalf of both the employer and the maid and to call for mutual trust and understanding between the two parties. Unlike the dilemma experienced by Wang (2007), Zhao Hua’nan unequivocally aims to ‘demonstrate the powerful psychology (qiangshi xinli) of disadvantaged groups in the community in order to highlight some important notes in the construction of a harmonious society’ (Meizhou Guangbo Dianshi 2009). The so-­called ‘powerful psychology’ refers to the self-­esteem and self-­reliance exhibited by members of disadvantaged groups when facing members of the upper class who earn ten times or 100 times more than they do (Li 2009). While Wang and Zhao have rather different aims in their writing, both foreground the party line of constructing a harmonious society. The first three episodes of Professor Tian centre on whether urban residents should hire a maid and how to get along with her. On the issue of the hiring of a maid, the members of the Tian family differ in their opinions due to their different economic status and values. Their neighbour Granny Zhang and Professor Tian’s son Tian Siwen support the idea of hiring. Granny Zhang argues that ‘it is [the] 1990s, time to enjoy ourselves’. Tian Siwen agrees out of filial piety: the ageing grandmother should be taken care of. Besides, as a high-­ earning executive for an advertising company, Tian Siwen is financially able to pay for a maid. Professor Tian and his wife are hesitant about the decision. While Professor Tian feels uncomfortable about having an extra person in their home, his wife Liu Qing feels that it is ‘exploitative’ to hire a maid and it gives her ‘a bad feeling’. Professor Tian’s mother and his daughter Yiwen, on the other hand, strongly oppose the hiring. Having been a maid herself before 1949, Professor Tian’s mother considers the hiring to indicate that one has forgotten one’s class origin and past suffering. As the daughter Yiwen is about to be made redundant at work, she is unhappy that the maid could earn more than she does. The second issue of how to deal with the maid is closely related to the way the employer views the occupation of maid. Again, urban residents, represented by the Tian family, are not able to reach agreement on this issue. Liu Qing, a deputy factory director, believes that the family is like a working unit and the

Negotiating class and the rural–urban divide   105 employer is the maid’s supervisor. Therefore, when hiring a maid, Liu Qing believes the family should follow an interview procedure and the maid should be managed just as a factory worker would be. Although Professor Tian disagrees with his wife’s way of hiring a maid, he also has doubts about how to treat the maid. Yiwen believes that a maid is a servant and therefore merits rough treatment. Siwen disagrees with his sister and mother, believing that all people are equal. Granny Zhang points out that Liu Qing treats the maid as a criminal in her interrogation-­like interview and does not mention a single word about salary. Liu Qing’s behaviour shows that she does not know the employment rules, for the maid also has the right to choose her employer. Granny Tian holds that the maid is also a human being and should be treated with courtesy. Professor Tian’s neighbour Old Chen proposes that the family should treat the maid as a family member because the maid eats, lives and works with other family members. After wrongly accusing the maid Xiaohe of stealing money, the Tian family finally establishes three basic rules for dealing with maids: equality, trust and respect. These coincide with the ideal of the modern social relationship. While the show presents different voices about the employment and treatment of the maid, on the third issue of ‘the difficulty of hiring a good maid’ it univocally emphasizes the ‘low quality’ (suzhi) of maids. Among the 28 maids hired by the Tian family, only two are good. The others all turn out to be problematic. For example, they are clumsy at work or ignorant of urban home-­ making practices. One hides the fact that she has tuberculosis; another uses the family’s telephone to sell products, subsequently incurring an exorbitant phone bill. Another does not know how to use the natural gas stove safely, resulting in the gas poisoning of Granny Tian. Yet another falsely accuses Professor Tian of making an unwanted sexual advance. Although the exaggerated portrayal of these ‘low-­quality’ maids brings a touch of light comedy to the show, as Sun (2009, p. 42) points out, the contrast between the high-­quality employer and the low-­quality maid transplants ‘seamlessly’ a ‘consumerist discourse—the need for “high quality” domestic service’ into a ‘discourse of citizenship’. The Maid and The Maid and the Security Guard are no longer preoccupied with whether to hire a maid or the difficulty of finding a good maid. Instead, these series focus on how the employer deals with the maid. While The Maid voices the concerns of the employer by recounting the bad behaviours of low-­ quality maids like Tao Yanzi and Xiaocui, the show also articulates the maids’ grievances. For example, the fastidious employer Yang Ah Xiu keeps suspecting and picking on the good maid Ma Xiaohui. Finally, in one episode, a maid who comes for a job interview teaches Yang and her husband a lesson. This retaliation by the maid, as Wanning Sun (2009, p. 49) has observed, shows that urban employers may have something to learn from their ‘inferiors’. In The Maid and the Security Guard, the screenwriter Zhao Hua’nan more assertively sides with the disadvantaged group and assigns more good qualities to the maid. With the exception of Dr Xie and his wife, who treat their maid Damiao like a family member, the other employers in this show all discriminate against or abuse their maids. The famous actress Luo Wen even locks up her maid, Muying, like a

106   Yanwen Li dog, suggesting the class oppression imposed on the maid. Damiao is the embodiment of the ‘powerful psychology’ of the weak, for she is courageous enough to defend her self-­esteem when scolded by her employer and helps her fellow maid Muying find a new employer. When she is struggling with the bad employer, Damiao shines with the brilliance of the rebel character of left-­wing literature. When she is with the good employer, she radiates with the warmth of human understanding and caring. The endings of Professor Tian and The Maid each offer resolutions of the social issues they are concerned with. Professor Tian concludes with Tian Yiwen becoming the family’s twenty-­eighth maid after she is laid off from her employment and retrains as a domestic worker. This ending implies that the rural migrant maid is not a safe choice for urban households. A blood relative is still the most trustworthy. In contrast, the finale of The Maid shows Ma Xiaohui and Tao Yanzi both becoming pseudo blood relatives of their employers. Convinced that Yang Ah Xiu is a nice person, Ma Xiaohui decides to return to Yang’s home as a maid. Yang also vows to treat Ma as her third daughter. After she thoroughly repents of her former misdeeds, Tao Yanzi is sent to a nursing school by Mr Qin and his wife. She returns to the Qin family at weekends. This happy ending of ‘becoming one family’ successfully removes the mutual dissatisfaction of both the employer and the maid and demonstrates the employer’s high quality and compassion.

The nature and reasons of romantic love Since the 1990s, romance and marriage have been an indispensable ingredient in various television genres. Other relationship-­centred genres such as urban romance, historical drama, commercial thrillers and bildungsroman have all incorporated the elements of romance and marriage as vehicles for their ideological messages. The three maid dramas discussed above are no exception, as they all feature romantic relationships between a maid and an urban man. The heroines of these romantic relationship are all ‘good’ maids. The same three shows also represent ‘bad intimacy’ experienced by maids. In Professor Tian, maid Xiaohe’s husband inflicts domestic violence on her and her son. Similarly, in The Maid, Zhao Guizhi, an older-­generation maid, has lost her son because her husband gambles him away. In The Maid and the Security Guard, Damiao’s step-­mother abuses her and tries to marry her off to an old bachelor in the neighbouring village. A high school graduate, Xiao Lin, the good maid in Professor Tian, is shown as being wiser than her employers, the Tian family. She chooses to become a maid because she wants to be independent and has made up her mind to prepare for the college entrance exam while working as a maid. Her relationship with Tian Siwen fits into the classic free love narrative pattern in modern Chinese literature that advocates youth autonomy over parental control and social conventions in issues of love and marriage. Key elements of the pattern include falling in love, encountering obstacles, struggling and gaining recognition in the

Negotiating class and the rural–urban divide   107 end. Although Xiao Lin and Tian Siwen make a well-­matched couple in terms of age and appearance, their social status differs dramatically. Born in Shanghai, Tian Siwen is an advertising executive with a college degree. His father is a professor and his mother deputy director of a factory. Born and raised in the countryside, Xiao Lin is a maid for the Tian family and her parents are both peasants. The urban–rural and occupational gap between the couple could not be more apparent. The producer of Professor Tian sets the dating scenes between Xiao Lin and Tian Siwen in romanticized contexts. They are repeatedly seen sitting cosily together at night-­time, chatting, strolling along a street, confessing their love for one another while seated on the garden bench or walking back together to the apartment Siwen rents for Xiao Lin. Through this aestheticized narrative strategy, Professor Tian creates a highly romantic portrayal of the love affair. Evening dates at the park or on the street are not only typical of urban young couples in the reform era, but imply a transformation of the maid’s identity. For example, in the first night scene during which Xiao Lin and Siwen get to know each other, Xiao Lin is studying by the glow of the table lamp. She is no longer a maid busy with the daytime household chores but a studious female student. Through this choice to avoid daytime scenes, the producer represents Xiao Lin escaping from her role as a maid, thus diminishing the class differences between Xiao Lin and Siwen. Night-­time also signals the transgressive nature of their love. It is precisely because their love cannot gain familial and social recognition that they have to meet at night. The spaces within which Xiao Lin and Siwen date—the suburbs and scenic spots—also have a potentially transformative function. In the narrative, Siwen’s advertising company needs to shoot a commercial for bottled mineral water. In these aestheticized rural spaces, Xiao Lin becomes an urgently needed model. Her stylized rustic charm is exactly what the commercial requires. Images of the pure and beautiful rural maiden have been a favourite of the twentieth-century ‘native soil’ literature (xiangtu wenxue). Professor Tian makes use of this literary tradition to aesthetically modify Xiao Lin’s rustic appearance. As a result, the urban–rural gap between her and Siwen no longer constitutes a barrier to love but instead becomes an appeal to love. Contrary to the romantic flavour of Professor Tian, Ma Xiaohui’s relationship in The Maid has a more practical goal: marriage. A former rural-­to-urban college student, Ma becomes the girlfriend of Zhang Xiaoguang, a saxophone player, and starts to help him with home-­making and babysitting, just like a wife. In contrast to Xiao Lin’s efforts to enter college, Ma drops out of college and stops seeing her classmates to please Zhang. Her sacrifice, however, does not win her a promise of marriage from Zhang, who insists that she is merely his maid and that he cannot marry a maid. On the one hand, this demotion from girlfriend to maid exposes Zhang’s immorality; on the other hand, it reveals their gender-­ specific status difference, suggesting that a woman who gives up her own professional and social life for a man is indeed not much different from a maid. The representation of Ma’s second relationship draws on the folk legend of the snail girl. In this legend, Xie Rui is a young peasant who became an orphan

108   Yanwen Li when he was a child. Pitying Xie’s industriousness and honesty, the heavenly emperor dispatches a fairy maiden in the form of a snail girl to help him with housework while he toils the land. Xie Rui later finds out the truth and asks for the hand of the snail girl. The two eventually get married (Gan 2007, pp. 116–117). Like Xie, the male protagonist in The Maid, Li Dalin, is an orphaned, hardworking policeman. His sister Li Xiaohe ostensibly hires Ma as the maid-­by-the-­hour for her brother. In fact, she wants Ma to be her brother’s girlfriend. Xiaohe’s function in the narrative of the show is hence similar to that of the heavenly emperor. Ma is, of course, the snail girl who does housework for Li Dalin when he is at work. The main reason that Xiaohe picks Ma is that she has what it takes to be a traditional virtuous wife. From the very beginning, Ma’s relationship with Li Dalin centres on the possibility of marriage, rather than love. In The Maid and the Security Guard, Damiao has been living in the city for eight years and no longer retains much ‘rural flavor’. Her lover Guoliang is a security guard for an apartment compound. Like Li Dalin, Guoliang lost his parents in early childhood and was adopted by an old cleaning lady who hopes that Damiao will become his girlfriend. Unlike the other two shows, The Maid and the Security Guard skips the couple’s dating process and shows them as a loving couple in the very first episode. Damiao is portrayed as bold and capable, whereas Guoliang is honest and loyal. The two thus embody the typical characterization of proletarian women and men in modern left-­wing literature. Guoliang not only assists Damiao in her struggle with her employer and the patriarchal aspects of rural life but also helps her look after her daughter Niannian, an abandoned little girl whom Damiao adopts. After finding out that Guoliang is unwilling to marry her because he has a brain disease, Damiao is even more determined to love him and takes on extra work to cover his medical costs. When Damiao loses her employer’s pet dog, the couple bear the consequences together and the incident strengthens their emotional bond. While their relationship is a reiteration of the narrative pattern of ‘testing the sincerity of a friend/lover in misfortune’ (huannan jian zhenqing), it does not lack romance or passion. Guoliang repeatedly plays the tune of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as a way of expressing his feelings towards Damiao and he imagines their happiness as a ballroom duet, which is visualized in the final scene of the show.

Struggles, barriers and the denouement The struggle between lovers and their opponents in the free love narrative pattern is a moment that crystalizes the values of the two parties. The struggle in Professor Tian occurs between the young couple and Siwen’s mother and elder sister. What Siwen’s family members oppose is not romantic love itself but love between Siwen and a maid. Siwen’s mother believes that a rural maid cannot understand real love and that Xiao Lin is dating Siwen merely because she desires an urban lifestyle. Siwen’s sister Yiwen also thinks Xiao Lin is not worthy of her brother’s love because of her status as a maid. Yet, in the eyes of the couple, the Tian family’s efforts to hamper their relationship based on class and urban–rural

Negotiating class and the rural–urban divide   109 differences represent social prejudices and traditional mindsets. Relying on the binaries of old and new, fairness and bias, the couple gains legitimacy in the discourse of modernity. Through Siwen’s declaration to his mother that his relationship is ‘my own business’ and ‘I have the right to choose’, Professor Tian combines the narrative of free love with the concept of the modern individual. As one of the most important myths of twentieth-­century Chinese literature, the free love pattern provides a number of helpers for the struggling lovers. In Professor Tian, Siwen’s co-­workers are strong believers in human equality; Siwen’s grandmother likes Xiao Lin’s caring personality; his father Professor Tian supports the idea of free love; and the writer Kang Ming persuades Siwen’s mother to let the children decide their own business. Like the principles of equality, trust and respect upheld by the Tian family in their dealings with the maid, the principles of equality, freedom and autonomy advocated by these helpers prioritize equality over other principles. The two sets of principles form the basis of an idealized modern harmonious society. Unlike the fierce battle for free love in Professor Tian, The Maid merely creates a few minor barriers in the way of the relationship between Ma Xiaohui and Li Dalin. One of the barriers is the misunderstanding caused by Li Dalin’s master, Old Wu, and his wife, Yang Ah Xiu. Unaware of Li’s relationship with Ma, Wu and Yang ask Li to date their daughter. Yet, when they find out the truth, they send Li their blessings and the misunderstanding is dispelled. The second barrier is caused by Li’s younger sister, Li Xiaohe, who wants Ma to stop working as a maid after she dates Li because she views being a maid as a lowly job. The focus of the conflict here is not whether a rural maid is qualified to be the girlfriend of an urban man, but the status gap between a policeman and a maid. Yet Li Dalin claims that what he cares most about is not equal social status but equal spiritual status. Through the words of Li Dalin the show conveys its ideological message: what matters most in a relationship is equality and respect. Yet the development of the plot seems to contradict this message. Li Xiaohe later changes her mind after she hears about the good deeds Ma has done, such as taking care of an elderly man who has no family and fighting bravely against a group of gangsters. Hence, what overcomes the barrier in the show is not the principle of equality and respect, but Ma’s virtues as a good woman. In this way, the show suggests that the underclass must try all it can to prove its moral excellence and trust to luck, rather than fight for its rights. Happiness depends on the actions of one’s opponents, rather than on one’s own actions. The Maid offers a rather dreamy ending, in which the voice-­over states that ‘Ma Xiaohui and Li Dalin finally got married and lived happily ever after, just like a fairy tale’. Accompanied by the voice-­over, the couple’s wedding photo slowly appears on the screen. The white wedding gown worn by the bride and the dark suit donned by the groom perfectly conceal their class difference. However, the probability of such a fairy tale happening in real life is almost zero. It is merely an ideological fantasy created by the show. The Maid and The Security Guard does not repeat the struggle and barriers of the previous two shows. This time, the main impediment to the relationship

110   Yanwen Li between Damiao and Guoliang is sexual competition from a second-­generation rich kid and an intellectual. Le Jingyuan, a real estate developer, kills Guoliang’s parents in a hit-­and-run car accident. After that, Le’s family suffers a series of calamities. Eager to atone for the wrong he has done, Le Jingyuan appoints Guoliang the general manager of his company and plans to marry his daughter, Le Lichuan, to him. When Guoliang saves Lichuan’s life at a critical moment, Lichuan falls in love with his heroism, a masculine quality she can only find in Western films. To get hold of Guoliang, Lichuan tears up her nightgown, pretending that Guoliang has had sex with her when drunk. After finding out that Damiao is dating Guoliang, Le Jingyuan scornfully swears at Damiao: ‘How dare a maid compete with my daughter for Guoliang!’. The rich are hence caricatured for their unhealthy concepts of love and immoral sexual competition. Guoliang also has a competitor, Damiao’s former boyfriend, Dr Zhang. When Zhang realizes that he has made a mistake in breaking up with Damiao, he decides to court Damiao again. While his way of courting is not as domineering as that of the Yue family, he also makes full use of his wealth and superior social status. These contenders from the higher class greatly enhance Damiao’s and Guoliang’s appeal. Besides, both thwart their contenders’ attempts to win by the allure of material wealth, bestowing an unearthly romantic flavour on their love. Damiao and Guoliang’s relationship seems to constitute a new variant of the revolution-­plus-love model of left-­wing literature. The message is ‘struggle plus love’, for their love is completed and complemented by their struggle against the rich and mighty. At the end of the show, Damiao and Guoliang dance together passionately in the rain, with Le Lichuan standing dejectedly to the side. This scene symbolizes the ultimate triumph of Damiao and Guoliang’s struggle against the rich. In real life, however, with increasing class stratification in Chinese society (Huihui Gaogao 2013), it is virtually impossible for rich people and intellectuals to fall in love with members of the underclass such as the maid and the security guard in the first place.

Conclusion Sun (2009, p. 18). argues that the maid is a ‘threshold figure’ who negotiates ‘a set of boundaries including gender, sexuality, class, place, rural versus urban attributes (behaviour, dress, attitudes), work versus non-­work and the domestic versus the public’. This chapter has suggested that the rural maid in literary works in the reform era triggers three types of boundary negotiation. First, that of urban men who push the boundary to their own advantage (the male employer’s sexual harassment of the maid, the urban man’s marriage of convenience with her); second, that of female employers who construct and reinforce the boundary; and third, that of a few intellectual women employers, who break down the boundary through their friendship with the maid, although this friendship proves vulnerable in the face of patriarchy. This analysis shows that serious literary works pay attention to the exposure and critique of social problems. Popular media narratives, however, are more eager to resolve the tension between the employer and the maid on an imaginary level. Over the past two

Negotiating class and the rural–urban divide   111 decades, maid-­themed television dramas have continued to shift their narrative focus from the initial three questions of ‘whether to hire a maid or not’, ‘how to get along with the maid’ and ‘the difficulty of finding a good maid’ to the sole question of ‘how to get along with the maid’. To answer this question, television shows have resorted to the narrative of romance, a favourite theme of popular culture. The romance narrative has two ideological functions: to address the mutual dissatisfaction between the two parties; and to allow the rural maid to successfully bridge the rural–urban gap and class divide and gain happiness. Popular media narratives use several strategies to accomplish these two ideological functions, such as modifying the social status of the male protagonist, the character of the female protagonist and their relationship pattern over the years. To close the gap between the urban man and the rural maid, the screenwriter has constantly reduced the social status of the male protagonist, from an advertising executive in Professor Tian to a security guard in The Maid and The Security Guard. The relationship pattern also evolves from free love in Professor Tian to arranged marriage in The Maid ��������������������� and ‘testing the sincerity of a friend/lover in misfortune’ in The Maid and The Security Guard, so as to make the ‘floating bridge’ to happiness for rural maids more realistic and convincing. However, in light of real growing urban–rural inequality, this floating bridge offered by popular narratives is neither stable nor realistic. As Tamara Jacka’s (2006) research on female migrant women in Beijing has shown, the romance between the rural maid and the urban man is, on the one hand, easily undermined by external forces and can lead to a tragic ending. On the other hand, regardless of their resentment of rural marriage and patriarchy, the maids are obliged to go back to the countryside and marry rural men because of the barriers to settling down in the cities. As long as there are no changes in the urban–rural class and gender structures, it would appear to be impossible to resolve the mutual discontent between the rural maid and the urban employer.

Acknowledgements This chapter received a research grant from Tianjin Social Sciences Foundation. The research is titled ‘Images of the Rural Migrant Domestic Worker in Contemporary Literature, 1990–2013’ (TJZW13–015).

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7 Wounded masculinities The subaltern between online longings and offline realities Tingting Liu

Tang Jun, a 31-year-­old male rural migrant worker based in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, originally from Anhui Province, was one of my key research participants. One day, during one of our online conversations, he sent me a song via the dialogue box feature on WeChat. It was a popular song entitled ‘Roamer Watch’ (luomabiao, 罗马表), composed and performed by a Chinese grassroots rock band called BuYi (布衣乐队). After the song landed in my inbox, Tang Jun then instructed me to read the lyrics which, he said, reveal much about his own emotional life. An excerpt from the lyrics of ‘Roamer Watch’ reads: My girlfriend, she is demanding She wants a Roamer watch. But I’m penniless. How can I afford a Roamer? What can I do? I picked pockets and got caught. Yet she was laughing at me. What the hell are you laughing at? All I did was for you, just for you.

(Author’s translation)

The harsh, direct lyrics capture quite dramatically the association between romantic love and materialism in contemporary China. Romantic love in today’s China revolves around financial stability and material possessions (Hird 2014; Louie 2014; Song and Zavoretti 2016). Material measures have become the norm that determines a man’s worth as a partner (Louie 2014; Song and Hird 2014; Zavoretti 2016). The widespread popularity of this song among young rural migrant men expresses the difficulty rural migrant men face in obtaining the wealth required for love: the man in the song has no other option but to steal a Roamer watch to satisfy his girlfriend. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China, there were a total of 281.71 million rural-­to-urban migrant labourers in China in 2016.1 Rural-­to-urban migrants are typically labourers who work in

114   Tingting Liu cities and engage in non-­agricultural industries but whose households (hukou) are still registered in the rural area. In Zhang Li’s words, migrant workers in China are commonly ‘strangers in the city’ (Zhang 2002). They come from different areas of the country, and have diverse social, economic and cultural backgrounds, but share a common goal: to earn money, make a living and acquire wealth in the city. As they lack local household registration status through the Chinese hukou system (Zhang 2002), rural–urban migrant workers are excluded from local educational resources, citywide social welfare programmes and many job opportunities (Chan and Zhang 1999; Liu 2005). They are also under-­represented in both discursive and political domains (Sun 2014). Its social significance aside, Tang Jun’s desire to communicate his song ‘Roamer Watch’ via social media reflects the importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the everyday lives of Chinese rural migrant labourers (Law 2012; Law and Peng 2006; McDonald 2015; Wang 2016). China’s ICT sector has experienced phenomenal growth due to developments in internet technologies and their extensive applications over the past two decades (Qiu 2008; Wang 2013; Yang 2012). ICTs have played a crucial role in the socio-­economic development process in the country, changing the pattern of people’s everyday communications (Law 2012; Law and Peng 2006; McDonald 2015; Wang 2016). ICTs have even enabled researchers like me to gather key research data through online exchanges. The means by which rural migrant women seek to negotiate identity and belonging in relation to digital media have received extensive scholarly attention. For instance, Cara Wallis (2013) adds the gender dimension to this discussion, arguing that labelling women labourers in mainstream discourse as ‘backward’ limits their use and understanding of mobile phones. Wallis uses the concept of ‘immobile mobility’ to describe how mobile phone use can, to some degree, empower rural migrant women, while maintaining that this empowering effect is hampered by the intersections of class position, gender and rural origins. What has not yet been adequately and systematically explored are the ways through which rural migrant men articulate online their gendered experiences of labour migration and their feelings about the masculine ideal, family responsibility and financial stability. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring the socially constructed nature of gendered desire and by highlighting the importance of digital media in expressing and influencing rural migrant men’s gendered longings and identities. Research on rural migrants’ masculinity is limited but growing. Choi and Peng (2016), for instance, reveal that young rural migrants place more emphasis on having a close connection with their loved ones compared to their parents’ generation. The ethnography of Xiaodong Lin (2017) makes a similar claim, showing that rural migrant men’s experience of rural–urban migration and their status as an emerging disadvantaged urban working-­class group have weakened, but not completely removed, the grip of Confucianism on their gender subjectivities.

Wounded masculinities   115 In a related study of this disadvantaged group, Elaine Jeffreys and Gang Su (2017) critically examined the government/state’s position on commercial sex and sexual health at the advent of the HIV epidemic, which is believed to be caused by homosexual men and rural-­to-urban migrant labourers. Adopting an ethnographic approach, this chapter aims to add another dimension to our understanding of rural experience by investigating the ideals of the ‘real man’ held by Chinese rural migrant male workers and the difficulties they face achieving these gendered ideals in contemporary China. In presenting research on Chinese rural labour migration, the chapter focuses on the sexual lives and romantic relationships of rural migrant men, focusing on their frustrated gendered aspirations. The chapter also recognizes the central role of digital media communication in changing and conditioning the migration experience and the gender identity negotiation process of rural migrant men. In the first part of the chapter, I examine the key elements believed to constitute a ‘real man’. This combines a literature review of studies on Chinese men and masculinity, data gathered during my localized fieldwork and a presentation of online discussions in which rural migrant men share their experiences of using aphrodisiacs, paying for sex and playing the mobile digital game Me Being an Emperor in the Qing Dynasty (我在大清当皇帝). The second part of the chapter documents and analyses the obstacles preventing these men from realizing their ideal of masculinity, drawing on ethnographic interviews I conducted in 2015 with rural migrant men.2

Research methods and field sites I gathered most of the empirical data for this chapter during long-­term ethnographic fieldwork in industrial areas in Southeast China. More specifically, I collected a number of stories from rural migrant workers during a four-­month internship in a local grassroots non-­governmental organization (NGO), the Labourer’s Centre (dagongzhe zhongxin), in the summer of 2014. A group of migrant workers established this non-­profit centre in 2010 with the aim of reaching out to rural migrant workers and helping to empower them. The NGO is located in one of the many industrial ‘urban villages’ (chengzhongcun)—Longgang—in Shenzhen. Later, between October 2015 and June 2016, I carried out further extensive ethnographic fieldwork. I worked in a factory in Dongguan that manufactures cell phone cameras and assembles cell phones. Dongguan is an industrial city around an hour’s drive from Shenzhen. During my fieldwork, I socialized on an almost nightly basis with a group of workers from the commercial areas near the factory after their night shift. These occasions provided me with the opportunity for in-­depth communication with male migrant workers. A second important field site included in the present study is located in the computer-­based virtual world, relying on the internet for distribution (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). Through daily contact with around 30 male migrant workers, I became familiar with the cyberspace world they regularly inhabit. Specifically, the research drew on the following online platforms:

116   Tingting Liu •

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• •

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Online forums themed ‘Dongguan’, ‘Qingxi Town in Dongguan’ and ‘migrant workers’ on Baidu Tieba, one of the largest Chinese online forums provided by the dominant Chinese search engine company, Baidu. Baidu Tieba is an online community closely connected with Baidu (Fuchs 2016) where users can search for or create a forum (or message board) by simply typing a keyword. The Baidu Tieba online forum targets young adults from the lower classes. Some WeChat public accounts (gongzhonghao) that target men. WeChat public platforms are attached to the dominant all-­in-one Chinese social media application, Wechat. WeChat public platforms are usually created by celebrities, government, media and enterprises. WeChat public accounts often attract readers through WeChat’s huge base of online users: currently, WeChat has over 980 million active users per month from a wide range of social groups and ages. For instance, in my fieldwork I observed that a number of migrant workers in Shenzhen followed the public WeChat account titled ‘Men’s Club in Shenzhen’ (Shenzhen Nanren Bang). The advertising for this public account states that it offers its users ‘various information for men, including sports, entertainment, food, cars, housing, travels and health care’. Most of its posts also contain advertisements. Another public WeChat account that is popular among rural migrant men is ‘Shenzhen Hengda Men’, the official WeChat account of the male sexual health clinic ‘Hengda’ (literally, ‘forever huge’) in Shenzhen. The clinic provides a service for men who struggle with sexual frustrations, such as premature ejaculation or erectile dysfunction, which can create deep feelings of shame. Some of the titles of the posts on the account include: ‘Tips on having longer sex’, ‘The types of penises that women like most’ and ‘What your life would be like if you became impotent’. Websites that offer paid sex, such as online forums and chat rooms.3 Rural migrant men’s personal social media pages, WeChat Moments and QQ Space, featured on WeChat and QQ, respectively. These features support message posting in the form of short notes to the users accompanied by the time and date the message was written. Online games that male migrant workers like to play. In a previously published paper (Liu 2017) I noted that many migrant workers in Southeast China enjoy playing digital games in internet bars. It is an important means for them to socialize.

In methodological terms, my approach is perhaps best described as ‘internet-­ related ethnography’ (Postill and Pink 2012, p. 124 rather than ����������������� ‘���������������� internet ethnography’. I met the participants in person and then followed them across multiple online digital communities to better understand how��������������������������� they engaged with��������� the �������� contents of digital media environments. I also acknowledge that the online accounts I studied did not belong to the people I interviewed. However, I believe that these two fieldwork sites—the physical sites in Southeast China and the online virtual world—are not separated but are in fact part and parcel of the reality of

Wounded masculinities   117 migrant workers’ daily lives. That is because these migrant labourers often live and travel through the online and offline worlds on a daily basis. For instance, the young workers I got to know in Shenzhen often consulted the Baidu search engine for information about the salaries and welfare entitlements a factory offered before actually seeking employment there. Their Baidu searches often directed the users to relevant online forums. In this way, some of the workers encountered the cyberspace related to the physical place before they actually went to work at the factory. However, the cyber and physical spaces are internally related to each other. For example, during my fieldwork I collected various printed reading materials (free uncopyrighted magazines and newspapers) in the commercial area in Shenzhen. The front and back covers of such print publications typically featured buxom, scantily clad, heavily made-­up young women. The major content of these publications were suggestions for helping men maintain their sexual health. The print materials were closely connected to cyberspace－there were always QR codes on the front and back covers of the magazines and newspapers. People could scan the QR codes via their smartphones in order to link to the public WeChat accounts of both the print materials and the male sexual health clinic, which financially supports such magazines and newspapers. In China, sexually explicit content cannot legally circulate online. As a result, some of the content presented in this chapter is highly transient in nature (Jacobs 2012); thus, the content I refer to may not be accessible when the book is published.

The ideal of subaltern working-­class masculinity Popular discourses circulating in the industrial areas in the Pearl River Delta, intersecting with the cyberspaces cited above, are teaching men an important lesson by asking—and then responding to—the question: ‘What makes a man successful?’. This main topic includes sub-­topics, such as: ‘What is the ideal life for a man?’ and ‘What kind of men do women like to marry or sleep with?’. During my fieldwork, I tried to turn daily conversations with rural migrant men into research opportunities by asking what they considered to be the ideal life. When chatting with the female workers, I also asked them how they defined a good man and what kind of man they hoped to marry. The workers’ answers indicated that the ideal of subaltern working-­class masculinity often incorporates two interrelated aspects. The first includes the diligence, perseverance and toughness needed to achieve economic stability. The second is the ability to find a good wife and to end up in happily monogamous, heteronormative relationships, fulfilling the social expectations of a heterosexual man. In this second aspect, men would occasionally exceed the boundaries set by the monogamous notions of romance and commitment and demonstrate some nostalgia for the Chinese male chauvinism of yesteryear.

118   Tingting Liu Diligence, perseverance and toughness Based upon his nuanced studies of premodern histories of Chinese masculinities, Louie (2002) suggests that in the premodern dynastic Chinese era (the years before 1910), masculinity was shaped by two archetypes that operated in relational tension. One is wen, the cultural and intellectual attainment central to the maintenance of civil order and vertical bonds of hierarchy and filial relations; the other is wu, the martial, physical masculinity, which is associated with the horizontal bonds of brotherhood. And it was often the case that men who demonstrated the combined attributes of wen and wu were most attractive to women (Louie 2002). As Louie (2002) points out, a Confucian masculine hegemony was predominant in ancient China, with wen/wu qualities at the core of society and the political system. These qualities were painstakingly cultivated by ancient emperors, the nobility and other powerful people. In the 1980s, the economic innovations commonly called ‘the Reform and Opening-­Up’ or ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ were enacted in China. The reform transformed China from a country devastated by revolution into a rapidly developing, market-­oriented Asian economy. The reform also created a system of beliefs and values that gave birth to a large number of what Lisa Rofel (2007) calls ‘desiring subjects’. Rofel (2007) argues that many Chinese now participate in practices that encourage them to acquire the habits of consumption and enjoyment of material goods in ways that were condemned during the socialist era. As Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) suggest, the dominant masculinity of a society adapts according to changes in social and economic conditions. And thus, the premodern traits of wen and wu in China have their most recent expressions: men who receive quality-­oriented (suzhi) education (with often expensive tuition fees) are regarded as good, civilized men (wenming ren); those who are able to meet the challenges of global business competition are considered to be good enough to compete in the labour market (wu) (Lou 2011). Song Geng concludes that the rapid economic growth and widening gap between rich and poor experienced by Chinese society has brought about an unprecedentedly close relationship between wealth and masculinities (Song 2004, p. 153). Popular culture responds rapidly to such changes. During my fieldwork, I often watched television dramas with my fellow female workers. I found that the male protagonists were consistently the stereotypical ‘tall, rich and handsome’ type (gao fu shuai), predominantly good-­looking business executives or young men from wealthy families. They were the ‘dream lovers’ of the young female workers. Lifestyle and a dress sense that reflects substantial wealth have also become ‘bonus points’ for urban, white-­collar males in the marriage market (Song and Lee 2010; Zurndorfer 2016). The participants in this study were a group of migrant workers from rural areas who had moved to the cities to earn a pittance, but were unable to settle in the cities because of household registration restrictions. Members of this group are very unlikely to obtain this type of ideal masculinity. In this context,

Wounded masculinities   119 d­ iligence, perseverance and the capacity to endure hardship become the important traits rural migrant men display to compensate for their economic disadvantage (Florence 2004, 2007). ‘Diligence’ (chiku nailao) is one of the words used most often by migrant workers to describe or praise the trustworthiness and virtue of a man. Similar phrases include: ‘not afraid of dirty and hard work’ and ‘willing to work hard’. In contrast, rural migrant men without these qualities are generally denigrated. For example, when discussing over a drink the concept of a ‘qualified man’, one of my male informants, Li Dong (aged 28, based in Guangzhou, from Guangdong Province), said, ‘A qualified man must be diligent. If a man is not able to provide an easy and cosy life for his woman, he is being irresponsible to her!’. Interestingly, ‘diligence’ is also the ideal quality a migrant worker should have. The term is often mentioned in factories’ recruitment advertisements in the Pearl River Delta, as seen in the text below from an advertisement, collected during my fieldwork in Qingxi Town, Dongguan, in November 2015: Hardware Company looking for general workers who are chiku nailao Wage: 3,000–5,000 Education: No limit Work Experience: No limit Number being recruited: 10 people Position: General worker Company Name: No. 378 Hardware Factory of Xinhua District Company Scale: 50–99 people Nature of Business: Raw materials and processing The attribute chiku nailao is a prerequisite for factory workers. It is typically mentioned in advertisements for those positions that are stereotypically considered to be ‘men’s jobs’, for example at machine tool plants, machinery plants, hardware factories, shipyards and abrasives factories.4 Chiku nailao is thus both a quality called for in factory employment contexts and a quality that rural migrant men believe to be central to manhood. The crossover in the term’s application shows how China’s newly built capitalist regime of production serves an ensemble of beliefs and practices. This ensemble functions as a pervasive technology of control, a set of limits within which social behaviour must be contained, providing various models to which individuals must conform. Such a collection of beliefs and practices not only refers to a gendered value useful to capital accumulation, but also extends to the private realm of rural migrant men’s intimate relationships. Chiku nailao has been incorporated into the set of ideal and therefore desired attributes of the working-­class male. Having the chiku nailao working ethos internalized, a good man should be willing to work hard no matter how heavy the industrial workload is, no matter how little the work pays and despite limited possibilities for upward mobility. Men who display the virtues of chiku nailao are, by extension, regarded as being realistic, responsible, and thus, trustworthy partners, husbands and fathers. Men

120   Tingting Liu who fail to live up to the quality of chiku nailao are thought to be lazy, idle and immature, and thus, ‘not man enough’. Marry a good wife (hao xifu) The ideal of subaltern, working-­class masculinity also includes the expectation of heteronormality. That is, the ‘real man’ aspires to enter a heterosexual marriage, raise children and carry on the family line (Choi and Peng 2016; Lin 2017). ‘Starting a family and establishing oneself in business’ (chengjia liye) are aspirations commonly shared by Chinese men from across the boundaries of age, class and geography (Louie 2002; Song 2004; Song and Hird 2014). Chengjia liye requires a man to be powerful and rich enough to be able to protect his wife, children and family. This ideal constitutes an indispensable part of the identity of rural migrant men (Choi and Peng 2016; Lin 2017). Not only do male migrant workers discipline themselves, but their family members also require this of them. On occasions, the responsibility to marry can cause significant mental pressure for rural migrant men, driven partially by a nationwide moral panic about the fear that not all men will find wives. This arises from an extension of the discourse of ‘leftover women’ (Fincher 2014) and the nationwide discursive construction of emotional loneliness that has problematized rural labour migration (Sun 2017).

Nostalgia for the Chinese ‘male chauvinism of yesteryear’ Yet, the ideal of subaltern working-­class masculinity can encapsulate further meanings beyond chiku nailao and chengjia liye. After a few glasses of beer, even in my presence, male migrant workers were happy to talk about their experiences of seeking paid sex in nearby cities and of taking aphrodisiacs. On these occasions, the men’s talk about their leisure activities was identical to the discussions I found in cyberspace. For example, they liked to talk about issues related to male sexual competence, both online and offline: ‘It’s said that a man’s penis will shrink if he often stays up late, is it true?’. To many male workers, coming to work in Southeast China is first and foremost an opportunity to explore whoring, gambling and taking drugs. By this, I do not suggest that every male worker was involved in these practices. However, the fact is that living and working in the industrial areas of Southeast China means that almost every man will have heard about these practices and will, at some point, decide for himself whether or not to take part. One of my major fieldwork sites, Dongguan, is a city known worldwide not only as the ‘manufacturing centre of the world’ but also as the ‘sex capital of China’. In 2015, Xi Jinping’s administration initiated an anti-­corruption campaign, which also led to a crack-­down on the sex trade in Dongguan, which is closely related to corruption among officials. During my fieldwork in 2015 and 2016, the sex industry in Dongguan experienced a great depression. But it never really vanished. People in Dongguan soon realised that the sex services had merely been obliged to

Wounded masculinities   121 r­ elocate to the nearby city of Huizhou. Almost all the male workers were well aware of this as they were easily able to get information from Baidu Tieba forums. Going to Huizhou to ‘broaden one’s horizon’ is considered a must for many of the male workers. Xiao Li (aged 23, from Fujian Province) said: ‘I go to Huizhou every month once I get my salary … I spent almost all my money on smoking, drinking and whoring; it’s impossible for me to save money. I’ve wasted my life.’  Brother Dragon (aged 28, from Jiangxi Province) held a different attitude. He said he had been whoring once and the prostitute had claimed to be a college student, which Brother Dragon did not believe. He had never gone whoring again. Still, Brother Dragon showed me, step-­by-step, how to find a sex worker online: At midnight or 1 a.m., when everyone feels lonely and horny, you can log onto the Baidu Tieba forum themed ‘Dongguan’. And some would message with scantily dressed women. Such women were likely to be prostitutes. All you have to do is to add her as your WeChat friend. The male workers also used Baidu Tieba forums to discuss which sauna house offers the best service or which clubs have the prettiest women. As Figure 7.1 shows, forum posts are visually suggestive although the text of the posts is

Figure 7.1 A post with picture on a Baidu Tieba forum themed ‘Qingxi Town in Dongguan’. Note The text of the post is about sub-leasing an apartment.

122   Tingting Liu not. The text in Figure 7.1 is about sub-­leasing an apartment. In order to evade censorship, sex workers often post messages completely unrelated to prostitution. But when presented with sufficiently explicit pictures, male workers are able to decode the hidden messages. During my fieldwork, I also found that some of the male migrant workers were playing a role-­play mobile phone game called, Me Being an Emperor in the Qing Dynasty. In this game, the player has first-­hand experience of being an emperor. As the advertisements for the game state, ‘You’ll get a feeling of actually being an empower’. Gamers can review official documents to the emperor (zou zhe) and handle state affairs. The most attractive feature of this game for male migrant workers is that it allows every player to have an imperial harem of his own. The emperor’s wives and concubines live in the harem, which houses up to 3,000 concubines, from whom the player, as an emperor, may choose one to sleep with every night. The promotional material in Figure 7.2 reads: ‘Restoring the luxurious life of the emperor with his many concubines.’

The harsh realities The selling point of the video game Me Being an Emperor in the Qing Dynasty is that players are able to fantasize about having 3,000 concubines to fulfil their sexual needs. This fantasy in male rural migrant workers’ cyberculture manifests strong androcentric desire and a misogynistic tendency. It simultaneously transgresses the boundary of monogamy and objectifies women. But, in reality, as my fieldwork revealed, the men who engaged with the game were well aware that it was just a game. In stark contrast to the abundance of concubines promised by the video game, the humbler vision of rural men migrating to the city to work is often to find ‘a good wife’. The hope of marrying a good wife occurs against a background in which anxiety about being single dominates public discussions and sociological analysis (Fincher 2014; Gaetano 2014; Sun 2017). Responding to and reinforcing the panic over singleness, television dating shows have experienced a resurgence in recent years. The most watched Chinese dating show during my fieldwork period was If You Are the One, which emphasized that being single was a problem for both men and women (Li 2015). As documented by Leta Hong Fincher (2014), today China is marked by a moral panic over singleness. Xiaodong Lin (2017) shows that the culture of stigmatized singleness has extended to men and is linked to the acute gender imbalance in the country resulting from the previous one-­child policy (Jin et al. 2015). Since 2000, there has been an empirically observable increase in the number of never-­married men among the population of China (Chen 2004). The problem of men being ‘leftover’ is particularly severe in rural China (Jin et al. 2015). According to China’s National Population Development Strategy Report, for every 100 girls born in China’s rural areas, 10 to 20 more boys are born at the same time (Chen 2004). The underlying cause of this is the local governments’ failure to prevent illegal foetal gender tests and newborn sex selection in rural areas. The issue of rural

Figure 7.2 A picture promoting the game ‘Me Being an Emperor in the Qing Dynasty’. Note The text reads, ‘In this game, players can have a gorgeous harem with many beauties.’

124   Tingting Liu migrants’ marriage—the lack of potential wives—has also been reaffirmed as a social problem, endorsed by the state and local social science research (Sun 2017). During my fieldwork, a number of male migrant workers explained that their reason for moving to the Pearl River Delta for work was the high number of young single women in the area. Pun’s (2005, 2009) research confirms that many factories in the southeast of China hire a large number of female migrant workers each year because of their relatively low salary demands and obedient natures. One male worker admitted, ‘I’ve never ever seen so many women back in our villages.’ Even though there is a relatively high number of women in the factories and in the city, the dream of finding a good wife to bring home is still hard to achieve. The difficulty can be observed from the following two stories I collected during my fieldwork. The protagonist in the first story is Tang Jun. I came to know Tang Jun in the winter of 2015 through the Youwei Migrant Worker Service Centre in Dongguan. Since 2007, Tang Jun had been working in a shoemaking factory where he operated the glue machine.5 At first glance, Tang Jun appeared to be one of the fortunate men who had succeeded in finding a wife during his rural-­to-urban labour migration. Tang fell in love with a female fellow worker at the factory and they were married soon afterwards. But it was only after his wife had fallen pregnant that he discovered that the factory did not provide maternity insurance. Dongguan hospitals are prohibitively expensive, so his wife was forced to return home to Anhui Province to have the baby. From the beginning of his wife’s pregnancy to the child’s first birthday, Tang Jun did not see his wife because he had to keep working in Dongguan to earn money to support his family. When he reunited with his wife in Dongguan two years later, Tang thought they could finally live happily together. But one day in March of 2013, Tang began to experience various symptoms, including dizziness, headaches and vomiting. In May, he was diagnosed with acute leukaemia. Later, he was diagnosed by the Occupational Disease Prevention Hospital in Guangdong Province as having an occupational disease. He believed that the large amounts of glue and chemicals to which he had been exposed had caused his disease. When I met Tang Jun, he was seeking help from the Youwei Migrant Worker Service Centre because the shoemaking factory had refused to take responsibility for his disease or cover his medical expenses. The disease meant that Tang Jun was no longer able to work, and he therefore lost his source of income. Moreover, he needed to receive chemotherapy and undergo a bone marrow transplant procedure, both of which were extremely expensive. This damaged Tang Jun’s relationship with his wife. When I met Tang, he had already divorced his wife, who was about to marry another man. The second story is about Ma Jingshan,6 who had a bad reputation among the workers; they referred to him as ‘diaosi’. The Chinese expression diaosi literally refers to a man’s pubic hair, while its intended meaning is very close to that of ‘loser’ in English. It describes a type of man who is born poor, earns a low income and is out of shape and of average appearance (Szablewicz 2014).

Wounded masculinities   125 People called Ma Jingshan ‘diaosi’ because at the age of 35, when a man is expected to be starting a family and demonstrating career achievements, he often spent his free time playing video games, like a teenager. He frequented internet bars near the factory after work each day, often playing all through the night. Ma Jingshan had once had a successful career. When he first came to Dongguan, he had worked in interior decoration. At that time, the Dongguan real estate market was prospering, owing to its proximity to Hong Kong, and Ma earned a significant amount of money. Formerly a notorious playboy, Ma found a girlfriend with whom he lived for a long time. However, Ma refused to marry her. In his own words, during that period of time he could ‘get as many women as (he) wanted’. However, in 2014 the government sent out public messages designed to curtail the too rapid development of the real estate market, and aimed to crack down on real estate speculators. As a result, the real estate market in the Pearl River Delta experienced a cold winter, and it became increasingly difficult to survive in the interior decoration industry. In 2015, Ma lost his job, and found himself in significant debt. The girlfriend who had once planned to marry him subsequently left him. To survive, Ma ended up working at an electronics factory. But he was not content with the boring job and meagre salary, believing: ‘I’m a capable man, just in a bad time. I’ll prove myself one day when the time comes.’ These two examples are not isolated, unique cases. Rather, they demonstrate challenges faced by many men in similar situations, who experience either an occupational injury that deprives them of their ability to work, or dashed hopes of economic success in an unstable economy. The protagonist of the first story, Tang Jun, used the term ‘81 difficulties’ to describe the hardships he had experienced throughout his life (a term originally used to describe the twists and turns experienced by the Tang Monk and his three disciples in the Chinese classic Journey to the West). But the twists and turns faced by male workers in China’s contemporary market economy are neither fantastic nor rare. Suffering from occupational injuries is not unusual in labour-­intensive factories with limited training in machine use and a low degree of automation. A significant volume of work needs to be done by manual operation. With insufficient labour protection, frequent occupational injuries are inevitable. Helping to safeguard the legal rights of workers suffering occupational injuries has thus become an important aspect of the work performed by many of the NGOs in the Pearl River Delta areas. Understanding the precarious nature of migrants’ work and their employment experiences and transitions in the contemporary world has been a key topic in academia in recent years (Standing 2011). While there is no unified and stable definition of ‘precarious work’, it generally refers to work arrangements and conditions associated with poor wages, temporary contracts and irregular hours (Kalleberg 2000, 2009; Masterman-­Smith and Pocock 2008; Quinlan 2012). Previous studies on China’s migrant workers illustrate their precarious working conditions (Pun 2005; Yan 2003; Zhang and Ong 2008). My fieldwork confirmed that work in South China features relatively low wages, long working

126   Tingting Liu hours with a lack of job security and a lack of safety in the workplace. In addition, many workers suffer occupational diseases and injuries. They face many challenges accessing training for their careers and providing for their children’s education and adequate living conditions. There is a lack of effective social protection of workers’ economic, political and cultural rights and interests. Migrant labourers are vulnerable to exploitation by employers and local officials. At the time of writing this chapter, Ma Jingshan, the protagonist in the second story mentioned above, had not recovered from his economic losses. In 2017, the government introduced stricter policies to regulate the real estate market.7 Together these policies reflect the unpredictable nature of the Chinese Communist Party’s economic agenda. The party-­state has been caught in a dilemma: the country’s economic growth is reliant on its determination to further naturalize free market logic; however, the party-­state also needs to maintain social order. Since Xi Jinping took office, the real estate market has been strictly regulated, a challenge for those who had previously made money during the real estate boom, such as Ma Jingshan.

Conclusion Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) suggest that masculinity is not an isolated phenomenon but an aspect of a larger social structure. They also recognize that there are multiple masculinities and that they vary across time, culture and the individual. This chapter has discussed both the desired and available masculinities among rural-­to-urban migrant labourers in contemporary China. It has focused on the contradictions between the ideals that rural-­to-urban migrant male workers hold as essential for ‘real men’, and the difficulties of fulfilling those gendered ideals. My research has shown that the elements constituting a ‘real man’ include job security, a close-­knit and healthy family that conforms to heteronormative notions of romance and commitment and a certain nostalgia for old-­fashioned ‘male chauvinism’. I also found that there are strong structural obstacles that prevent these men from realizing such ideals: a large number of unmarried surplus men relocated to rural areas due to the acute birth gender imbalance, their economically precarious status and their lack of cultural capital to become desirable to women (exemplified by the stereotypical tall, rich and handsome man). This chapter was written at a time when leading an active online digital life is becoming ‘the ordinary, the everyday and ongoing’ (Mason 2016, pp. 3–4). At first glance, the contradiction that I noted above between the ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ masculinity available to rural migrant men appears to equate with the demarcation between the ‘online’ (as the ‘ideal’) and the ‘real’. However, as suggested by a number of pre-­existing studies of digital life, the offline, physical, real spheres and the online, digital, virtual spheres of people’s lives cannot be seen as discrete; in fact, they overlap (Campbell 2004; Horst and Miller 2012; Miller and Slater 2000; Mowlabocus 2010). It has also been argued that it is unhelpful to use terms such as ‘online’ and ‘real life’ to distinguish between digital and

Wounded masculinities   127 non-­digital environments and to suggest that digital life is ‘less real or meaningful than experiences offline’ (Campbell 2004, p. 20). In addition to connecting the virtual world and the real physical world, this chapter has explored both the public and personal spheres of male migrant workers. To these migrant workers, diligence and perseverance are crucial qualities that a man must possess, though being diligent and persistent is far from enough: these qualities must bring about wealth. Earning sufficient money to achieve economic stability is an essential requirement if one is to ‘bring a wife home’. Since these elements of ideal masculinities are preconditions for each other, it is hard to realise this ideal: if a man were to fail in one area, he would likely face much difficulty in the other areas. As my research suggests, the connection between the online and the offline world is complex. Online content targeting working-­class men speaks to highly ‘desiring subjects’ whose gendered (and even misogynistic) aspirations often rely on material consumption and exceed the boundaries set by heteronormative notions of commitment (Rofel 2007). For my participants, discussing female objects of desire on the internet and searching for information on extramarital affairs, paid sexual services and aphrodisiacs is at the centre of their gendered longings. The digital media life of male migrant workers thus differs sharply from that of young migrant women (Wallis 2013). However, the excitement and glamour of the virtual world disguises the simple fact that it is difficult to secure a partner within heteronormativity. This rupture is more than mere evidence of the demarcation between online virtual life and offline real life; instead, it actually points to the innate contradiction in capitalist development in China today. Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’ is relevant here. Berlant (2011) uses the term to describe the condition in which people remain unconsciously attached to unachievable fantasies of an imagined ‘good’ life that includes upward mobility, job security, political and social equality and durable intimacy. However, such elements are no longer available in Chinese society. The country’s further economic development relies on its citizens’ relentless desire for material possessions, sexual fulfilment and their long-­held belief in the solidity and security provided by lifelong partnerships; but the opportunities that such an economy can offer to the subaltern, rural, migrant working-­class male are rare.

Notes 1 See the Annual Report on Rural-­to-Urban Labourers (2016) issued by the National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China, available at: www.stats.gov.cn/ tjsj/zxfb/201704/t20170428_1489334.html. 2 This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and a Chinese Society for Women’s Studies Scholarship for Junior Feminist Scholars. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 2018 U40 China– Australia Conference on the theme of ‘Social Technologies, User Communities and Cultural Knowledge in China and Australia’. 3 Sexual services are still illegal in China, so website domain names and titles will not be identified here to protect users’ privacy. 4 As I observed during my fieldwork, workers at these factories were indeed mostly men. 5 Tang Jun is from Nanchong in Sichuan Province. He was aged 31 in 2015.

128   Tingting Liu 6 Ma Jingshan, aged 35 in 2015, is from a rural area of Guangdong Province. 7 In March 2017, the Dongguan government released an official announcement that it intended to further regulate the local real estate market by instituting house price controls, locally known as the ‘Price Cap Order’ (xianjia ling). In April 2017, Dongguan stipulated that people without the local hukou would only be able to purchase real estate after paying social insurance for an entire year, and that they must pay social insurance or income tax for two consecutive years in order to be eligible to purchase a second house/flat. The regulation is referred to by locals as the ‘Purchase Restriction Order’ (xiangou ling).

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Part III

Gender, race and class

8 Women in rural romantic love Gender politics in television dramas Huike Wen

Literary theorists argue that although the details of love stories vary, narrative patterns are more enduring. For instance, Pamela Regis (2007), a prominent scholar of English romance novels, summarizes eight elements discussed by scholars of romance novels and argues that analysing these elements (or their realization through narrative events) is essential if we are to understand the stories’ assumptions and positions on social issues such as gender roles. All the elements Regis summarizes focus on the protagonists’ courtship, which, in the romance genre, is a vital narrative device through which the heroines, and therefore female audiences, express their desires. Regis (2007, pp.  31–38) points out that the eight elements identified by literary critique as crucial to the romance genre are: 1

The novel’s definition of society: Near the beginning of the novel, the society that the heroine and hero will confront in their courtship is defined for the reader. This society is in some way flawed; it may be incomplete, superannuated, or corrupt. It always oppresses the heroine and hero.

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

The meeting of the hero and heroine: ‘Usually near the beginning of the novel, but also sometimes presented in flashback, the heroine and hero meet for the first time. Some hint of the conflict to come is often introduced.’  The barrier that prevents the hero and heroine from getting together. The attraction between the hero and the heroine. The declaration of the hero’s love for the heroine, and the heroine’s love for the hero. The ‘ritual death’ that makes union between the hero and heroine seem impossible. The recognition, when the author gives new information that may allow the barrier to be overcome. Betrothal, when the hero asks the heroine to marry him and she accepts, or vice versa.

One prominent romantic television series in contemporary Chinese culture, however, seems to diverge from this pattern. In Rural Romantic Love Stories

134   Huike Wen (Xiangcun Aiqing Gushi, 2006–present), courtship is almost completely absent. This absence suggests a culturally specific or unusual interpretation of gender relationships in contemporary rural China in the imagery created by Benshan Media Company. Rural Romantic Love Stories was initially released in 2006. Since then, the story has developed into 10 series and, at the time of writing, shooting recently started for series 11. The show is the longest-­running television drama focusing specifically on rural people in north-­eastern China. It has become part of many Chinese people’s viewing, and the village represented in the story has entered the collective imagination. This chapter continues the theme of the romantic experiences of rural people, but moves the setting from the city to the village. I examine the representation of romantic (or unromantic) love in the countryside in recent Chinese television programmes, focusing particularly on the Rural Romantic Love Stories series. Based on a detailed examination of the stages of the main protagonists’ love stories, I argue that because of three cultural and ideological constraints, Rural Romantic Love Stories cannot imagine a romance in which heroines find agency and freedom to love. These constraints are: the series’ persistent use of the male gaze; the series’ representation of women’s responsibilities and their duty to take care of their conjugal families and their villages; and the fact that romantic love is not a means for women to gain some sense of freedom (Radway 1991; Regis 2007;) but used as a symbol of a strong and progressive Chinese economy as well as a subject embedded in neoliberalist ideology—stressing individual development while downplaying the power and responsibility of the social system. This representation of romance is rooted in a lengthy tradition of using women as a symbol of nationhood.1 Therefore, first, I review the modern Chinese media’s presentation of romantic love stories set in rural areas to understand the legacy, continuation and contemporary interpretation of relationships in the Rural Romantic Love Stories series. I also take a brief detour to consider Zhao Benshan and his company, the producers and their gendered culture, which, I argue, have significantly influenced the drama’s plot and narrative. Within the historical and production context, I apply romance studies literary theories to examine in detail the ways in which Rural Romantic Love Stories reflects the Chinese media’s strategic interpretation of the function of romantic love. In conclusion, I argue that the representation of romantic relationships provides an opportunity, through the absence of the women’s agency in the story, to examine and understand the interplay between a masculine perception of gender and the ‘good life’ in recent China.

Rural areas and romantic love in Chinese media The contemporary Chinese television industry faces a dilemma: on the one hand there is overproduction while, on the other, certain types of stories are under-­ represented. According to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, in 2015 rural stories made up only 3.81 per cent of television drama series and 2.96 per

Women in rural romantic love   135 cent of television drama episodes released nationally. In 2016, 499 television drama series (15,259 episodes) focused on urban life, but only 62 series (2,064 episodes) depicted rural life (Li 2016). This pattern has persisted for many years. In addition, most stories about rural life are low-­budget productions, and the plot is either an imagination of the grievances and misery of rural people or a comical send-­up of the ‘less advanced’ lifestyles and beliefs of farmers. As a result, from the perspective of both quantity and quality, rural areas are under-­represented on Chinese television screens. Despite their scarcity in Chinese media over the past two decades, stories about and images of rural areas, especially rural love stories, have long been an essential aspect of modern tales of Chinese revolutionaries (Jing 2007; Wang 2011; Zhong 2000). Examples include The Peach Girl (Taohua Qixue Ji, 1931), one of many leftist movies in 1930s Shanghai; Tales of Hulan River (Hulanhe Zhuan) in Xiao Hong’s 1930s novel and Xiao Xiao in Shen Congwen’s 1930s novels; The Story of Liubao Village (Liubao de Gushi, 1957) in 1950s communist films; communist narrative poetry such as Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang (Wang Gui yu Li Xiangxiang, 1946); and Third Sister Liu (Liu Sanjie, 1960) and The Girl Liu Qiao’er (Liu Qiao’er, 1956) in 1950s and 1960s Chinese folk opera films. These rural love stories have provided a discourse through which the transformation of Chinese society in the twentieth century could be displayed. The discourse praises the achievements of the communist regime in changing China into a better society by liberating women from feudalist patriarchy and transforming them into social individuals and productive labour in the new socialist system. The fact that communist military power developed and grew in the countryside has played an essential part in depictions of the role of the Chinese communist regime and its ‘glorious’ revolutionary history. The importance of this rural origin in the modern collective imagination of a common revolutionary past can be seen in the fact that even during the Cultural Revolution (1967–1977), when culture was reduced to ideologically approved forms, most of the ‘model operas’ (Yang Ban Xi) that the government allowed to be performed were set in the countryside. Among the small pool of permitted operas was White Haired Girl (Bai Maonü, 1964), the story of a girl whose hair turned completely white after she was forced by a landlord to live in the wilderness. She was thought to be a ghost until the Communist Party restored her freedom and she was able to marry the young man she had always loved.2 Rural love stories reached their peak in post-­Cultural Revolution literature in the 1980s, when most writers returned from the countryside to which they had been forced to move under the 1960s and 1970s policy of ‘Going to the Mountains and the Countryside’ (Shangshan Xiaxiang). The intent of this policy had been to fulfil the two main ideas from the Mao regime’s expectations on youth: ‘integration with the working class and moral–political education’ (Price 2005, p.  2). These writers’ stories mixed individual nostalgia with collective passion and sorrow over lost personal and educational opportunities (Jing 2007). Liang Xiaosheng is one of the most well-­known and most critiqued novelists to publish

136   Huike Wen stories of this kind. Liang and many other writers, artists, sociologists and thinkers who were productive in the 1980s recounted their experiences in the Cultural Revolution and created an entire generation’s collective memories about the loss of innocence and the sorrows of love. In their stories, the countryside was where intellectuals learned about the harshness of life and true human nature and experienced passionate and risky love. The countryside was romantic yet cruel because it was full of enthusiasm and dreams that were directly tied to masculine libido while opening the heroes’ eyes to the fact that a political ideology and regime could significantly affect an individual’s health, beliefs, values and relationships (Jing 2007; Zhong 2000). When the export of Chinese movies to the West started in the 1980s and 1990s, the so-­called fifth-­generation film directors once again favoured the scenery and stories of the countryside. Ever since Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (Huang Tudi, 1984) won the Silver Leopard at the 1985 Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland, fifth-­generation directors, such as Zhang Yimou, have won many international awards with movies that tell stories based in the countryside. Red Sorghum (Hong Gaoliang, 1988) is among the most representative of this genre, also called ‘Northwest Wind-­style Culture’ (Xibei Feng)—a culture that tells about the loss, remedy, rediscovery and excessive representation of masculinity in post-­Cultural Revolution China (Zhong 2000). While internationally recognized Chinese films displayed masculine desire in the outdoors, Chinese television began to favour urban spaces—for example, in Yearning (Ke Wang, 1990). As Lisa Rofel (2007) argues, this story was the first television drama focused on domestic life in a city, and it represents the beginning of the desiring China from a collective imagination of the past and the future. At around the same time, Fence, Women and Dogs (Liba, Nüren he Gou, 1989) and two other television dramas referred to as ‘The Trilogy of Women’ (Nüren Sanbuqu) became major hits. These series were set in north-­eastern China and represented individual, familial and community desire, anxiety and interaction. In Fence, Women and Dogs, the story centred on the love triangle of Zao Hua (the woman), Tong Suo (Zao Hua’s husband) and Zao Hua’s first love, Xiao Geng; it depicted romantic love between older people, a topic that previously had rarely been tackled. ‘The Trilogy of Women’ represents the watershed of Chinese television dramas regarding the representation of gender and the male gaze of the director, Chen Yuzhong, and the writer of the original novel, Han Zhijun. ‘The Trilogy of Women’ signalled the end of romances that focused on masculine imagination of the emotions of female protagonists in rural China. At the same time, the story, through detailed representation of the male protagonists’ struggles, announces the beginning of romances directly (if not exclusively) expressing masculine desire and anxieties in post-­socialist Chinese countryside-­ themed television dramas. Like ‘The Trilogy of Women’, most of the television dramas of the period were either directed by men, based on male writers’ stories or both.3 After ‘The Trilogy of Women’ and Yearning, the Chinese media, like other Chinese enterprises, rapidly began transforming from a state-­owned institution

Women in rural romantic love   137 into a profit-­seeking industry (Lewis et al. 2016). Rural love stories were largely ignored by the creative industry, which was desperate to attract urban consumers and wealthy sponsors. The consumption-­based imagination of romance and dating culture could only really be depicted as happening in metropolitan spaces, such as restaurants, shopping centres, college campuses, at the zoo or library or on a bus or a busy street, or in some other urban setting where consumption could be deeply embedded in the stories’ narration.4 Conflicts, arguments, courting, greetings and misunderstandings were all shown as happening somewhere on a city street. The elements of consumer culture were seen as creating opportunities for interaction and conflict, and thereby provided an important source of plots for romantic stories. Characters could be shown overcoming difficulties and conquering obstacles to develop relationships and celebrate triumphs. Compared to the excitement and adventure fiction represented as typical of cities, rural areas were seen to provide few raw materials or interesting opportunities for love to happen, to be tested, interrupted or redeemed. The 1990s film Red Sorghum depicted a beautiful wilderness where the revolutionary protagonists were able to make love uncontrollably and passionately. But in twenty-­firstcentury Chinese television, who could imagine a conflict-­filled relationship happening in a sorghum field between a stylish heroine and a cool and wealthy Mr. Right? Men and women passionate about a common love interest were unlikely to appear in rural areas, which were places that most young people despised and from which they could not wait to escape. In the imagination of Chinese television producers in the twenty-­first century, rural areas have become places where romance does not have space to exist. Rather, they are places from which young people should flee in order to chase their dreams, places teenagers are encouraged to leave by passing the national university entrance exam and moving away to college. People from rural areas are embodied in peasant workers who have migrated to the cities and are seen as threatening the safety of urban citizens and disturbing the harmony of urban spaces (Sun 2008, 2014). The hukou (household registration) policy5 often places students from rural areas in the disadvantaged position of competing with students from the cities for identical opportunities. The countryside is not seen as a convenient, exciting or comfortable place to live. It is not a place where one can hope to improve one’s life or start a passionate love story. As Hairong Yan (2008, p. 49) points out, for rural youth—especially young women—in pursuit of a modern subjectivity in post-­socialist China, cities are ‘the field of life’ and rural areas ‘the field of death’. Most television dramas, documentaries (both official and independent) and literary stories represent the countryside as in need of reform and rural people as in need of liberation from the backwardness of gender roles and familial relationships as well as the boredom and difficulties of peasant life. In other words, in recent Chinese media representations rural areas exist as a problem. The countryside is often the battleground that creates new communist martyrs who sacrifice their health and their lives in the hope of eliminating poverty, or the new communist reformers who dare to take risks and promote new ideas to help the

138   Huike Wen local economy and fight official and business corruption and economic backwardness.6 Meanwhile, alongside the imagery of rural areas as economically disadvantaged and offering an uncomfortable and inconvenient lifestyle is that of the countryside as a haven. For example, in Nong Jia Le (Happy Peasant House), a village-­style resort that arose in the 1990s, the countryside is a place to which city folks can drive their cars to spend a weekend; or where the elderly and intellectuals can find comfort and ease their bodies, souls and minds, exhausted by urban life (Chio and Harrell 2014, p. 49). No matter what the imagery is, rural areas are hardly seen as a desirable or believable space for romantic love among residents. Given the historical and social background of rural areas in Chinese romances, the way in which Rural Romantic Love Stories creates a space for romantic imagination provides insights into television’s construction of the feelings of its target audiences.

Rural Romantic Love Stories: an off-­topic love story Rural Romantic Love Stories first aired in 2006, just after the economic reforms had finally begun to affect mainstream culture and media production and circulation (Wang 2008). After 2006 many artists started their own companies, and these companies’ media projects often embody their producers’ individual goals and backgrounds.7 Rural Romantic Love Stories apparently reflects its producers’ specific backgrounds, too. The series is produced by Benshan Media Company, founded and owned by Zhao Benshan, the most widely known comedian in China. Zhao Benshan’s background is humble—his mother died when he was only seven, his father left home and he was raised by his uncle, a blind folk artist. He grew up in poverty and instability and made a living by performing Er’ren Zhuan, a folk performance art rooted in the countryside of north-­east China. Zhao Benshan rose to fame after he portrayed a blind street artist in Lachang Xi and then in the Chinese Spring Festival Gala in 1983 (Zhang and Song 2009). Benshan Media Company, originally named Liaoning Folk Art Ensemble, was established in 2003. It was renamed the China Cultural Industry Association in 2011 and quickly developed into one of the most profitable media companies in the country. It focuses mainly on cultural products introduced and popularized in the countryside in north-­eastern China. The company’s principal actors are not simply employees; they must go through a disciple ceremony and become Zhao Benshan’s apprentices (Tu Di). This is intended to keep alive the tradition of folk art and its familial relationship between employees and the company, which requires employees’ loyalty, honesty and dedication to the employer and company. The apprentices, mostly men, must adhere to the company’s moral code. The majority of the apprentices are folk artists who have never received any formal education in an art institution, and their fate is heavily dependent on their life skills and the roles and opportunities the company gives them (Zhang and Song 2009). Many Chinese intellectuals, such as the well-­known cultural

Women in rural romantic love   139 critic Wang Meng, have criticized Zhao Benshan, in his role as peasant turned artist and entrepreneur, and the Benshan Media Company. Wang (2009) and other intellectuals often criticize the art produced by Zhao Benshan and his disciples as vulgar, low grade, tarnishing the images of Chinese rural men and as harming healthy and civilized Chinese popular culture (see CCTV 2017; China Cultural Industry Association 2017). The Benshan Media Company’s background provides a context within which to understand the portrayal of the roles and events of romantic love in Rural Romantic Love Stories. The stories are set in Xiangya Shan (Ivory Mountain Village), a fictional community located in north-­eastern China. Like the company itself, the fictional village is dominated by men (both the characters and the actors in the television drama) from the area. Given the media company’s composition, and Zhao Benshan’s background, the question arises: What kind of romantic love story does the company tell? The stories that make up Rural Romantic Love Stories differ from those of other popular media, which almost exclusively focus on metropolitan youth. The stories provide a gold mine for an analysis of the series’ gender roles and the ‘unique’ and region-­specific view of its imagination and depiction of romantic love.

The couples’ encounters Popular media in both China and the West often portray romantic love as starting with a dramatic, unexpected encounter. This functions to stress the excitement and passion in a relationship. Even people who have grown up together or know one another well often experience sudden or unexpected exciting events that lead to the start of a relationship. The romantic love story requires a dramatic beginning to attract and keep the audience’s attention. This is important in literature and extremely important in visual media, when people can easily switch channels or navigate to a different website. All the couples in Rural Romantic Love Stories, however, are already in a relationship when the drama starts. Rural Romantic Love Stories skips the couples’ first meetings and uses this omission as a signifier of its rural setting, where populations rarely migrate and neighbours know each other, their families and even their ancestors very well. While this is still true to some extent, there have been changes since the 1990s when many peasants and young people began migrating to the cities to work, study or manage small businesses. I will return to this point later. First, however, I focus on the impact of this omission of the first encounter between the young couple on the gender roles and relationships in the story. Bypassing the young couples’ first encounters takes away the most important, if not the only, opportunity for the female protagonists to display a certain type of agency and for the male protagonists to explore and question their desires. According to Pamela Regis (2007, p. 22), ‘A romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines.’ She draws attention to the ‘narrative events’ that express courtship and betrothal

140   Huike Wen and emphasizes that ‘analyzing the essential elements of the narrative’ will ‘explain the final element of the proposed definition: its focus on the heroine’ (Regis 2007, p. 23). A vivid depiction of the courtship is important for romances, whose goal is often to tell the story of a heroine even if from a patriarchal gaze (Radway 1991; Regis 2007). In mainstream romantic love stories, the man is often more active than the woman in pursuing a love interest and making the first move, asking the woman out and showing great enthusiasm and attention to accommodate her preferences and emotions. Theorists of the romance genre have argued that this fictional representation of the heroes’ consideration and effort to cater to the female protagonists’ needs is vital to satisfy women’s/readers’ beliefs that romance is an equal relationship that offers self-­realization—something that very few women can in fact attain in a patriarchal society that trivializes issues about gender roles. This is not to say that in the common fictional depiction of the first encounter of two people in a heterosexual relationship, women have an agency that is independent of the values and beliefs dominant in patriarchy. However, the encounter at least gives the heroine the opportunity to make a choice. As a result, by skipping the first meeting of the love interests, Rural Romantic Love Stories eliminates opportunities to depict the female protagonist’s thoughts and desires. Instead, women’s thoughts, struggles and questions about their desires are directly assimilated into collective or communal values.

The obstacle in the relationships In Rural Romantic Love Stories, the only obstacles to the young couples’ relationships are their fathers’ life goals and relationships with each other. Four families appear in the story: those of Xie, Wang, Zhao and Liu. The story centres around Xie Yongqiang, a young college graduate who returns to the village while waiting for a job to come up in the municipal educational department that will allow him to fulfil his dream of working in the city as a respected official. This dream is also that of Xie Yongqiang’s father, Xie Guangkun, and is the ­village’s expectation for Yongqiang. His high school sweetheart, Wang Xiaomeng, who has been helping her father manage a tofu business, becomes an obstacle to Xie Yongqiang’s career because Yongqian’s father believes he should find a romantic partner whose job and family background match his education and social status. At the same time, the village head’s daughter, Xiangxiu, is attracted to Xie Yongqiang. She wants a husband with whom she can relocate so she can continue her nursing job in an urban hospital or clinic. Xie Yongqiang’s father thinks Xiangxiu is a good match for his son because her father is the village head; his power and relationship with the town head might give Xie Yongqiang the chance to get the job he desires. Xie Yongqiang has no feelings for Xiangxiu and still likes Wang Xiaomeng, but he is timid and overly influenced by his father and enjoys Xiangxiu’s eager affection and admiration. Although torn between his feelings for Wang

Women in rural romantic love   141 Xiaomeng and his career goals, he accepts his father’s arrangement and becomes engaged to Xiangxiu, which leaves Wang Xiaomeng in torment. Xie Yongqiang’s surrender to patriarchal power and his father’s coldness towards Wang Xiaomeng and her father despite the many years of her relationship with Xie Yongqiang make Wang Xiaomeng realize that she must improve her family’s status in the village and win back respect for her father and her family. Xie Yongqiang’s dream of working in the municipal education department is dashed when the town head tells him a position is not available. He loses the respect of all the villagers, his family and, of course, his fiancée, Xiangxiu. While Xie Yongqiang’s status declines from being the hope of the entire village to being the shame of his family, Wang Xiaomeng’s tofu business, which has created many jobs for young women in the village, has taken off and her family has become the wealthiest in the village. With her generous heart and her enduring love for Xie Yongqiang, Wang Xiaomeng wants to help Xie. However, Xie Yongqiang is too ashamed to accept Wang Xiaomeng’s unconditional support and decides to find his own career and redesign his future. Xie Yongqiang’s father is disappointed by his son’s career and upset by Xiangxiu’s and her father’s abandonment. He goes to Wang Xiaomeng’s father asking for forgiveness and permission for the children to wed. Wang Xiaomeng and her father forgive the Xie family and decide to reconcile with them and help with Xie Yongqiang’s plan to turn some barren land into an orchard. Similarly, in the Liu family’s story, Liu Ying and Zhao Yutian’s relationship is constantly influenced by a father. In this case, trouble comes from Liu’s father’s ideas about protecting his daughter’s rights in marriage and the way he takes advantage of the son-­in-law’s family for his own financial and emotional needs. Rural Romantic Love Stories frequently shows the thoughts, self-­reflections, interactions and conflicts of the fathers, instead of those of the hero and heroine whose romantic love is the apparent motive for the stories. Many narrative strategies often used in popular romance are absent from the series, such as social-­ class gaps, a competitive suitor’s dogged pursuit, the parents’ direct confrontation of the young protagonist’s love interest, the protagonists’ demanding careers and conflicting personalities. Rural Romantic Love Stories thus differs from love stories focusing on young urbanites. The unequal attention given to the fathers and the young couples, especially the women, raises the question: Is this really a romantic love story as the title claims? And if it is, what is the nature of this romantic love depicted by these television dramas?

The development of relationships In most romances the development of the relationship between the hero and the heroine depends on how the protagonists overcome obstacles and solve problems together. If the obstacles are too unrealistic to overcome, stories usually end before the young couples have to deal with them. Alternatively, stories may  find a space to escape to, either geographically or in the characters’

142   Huike Wen i­maginations. Escape plots are ubiquitous in time-­travel stories, science fiction, fairy tales and the like. But in romance genres, the young couple usually develop their relationship (at least from strangers to partners) because of their love. In many romances, it is the process of working on their problems that brings them together. Regardless of a romantic plot’s complexity, the couple’s love is the driving force, and they eventually conquer the problems because of their love. Everything that happens is an opportunity to test their love, help them find their true feelings and either strengthen their relationship or end it, depending on whether the text is a comedy or a tragedy. Rural Romantic Love Stories does put the young couples through the tests as frequently as most romances; however, the causes and solutions of the problems are rarely within the young couples’ control. Because the characters in Rural Romantic Love Stories are bound by traditional filial piety, all the young couples’ relationships are excessively influenced by their fathers’ needs, values and beliefs. Consequently, the young couples are not given agency or independence to reflect on their own views about life and relationships. The relationships are left in the hands of the fathers, who usually return to their senses as a result of changes in the situation. For example, in the Liu family story, Zhao Yutian’s leg heals after a car accident, which causes Liu Ying’s father to regret that he broke the engagement; and in the Xie story, Xie Guangkun kneels down in front of Wang Xiaomeng’s father asking for help when his son Xie Yongqiang refuses to give up his idea of creating an orchard. Many climactic moments occur when the fathers compete for power, influence and stature. These types of plots are very comical, as they ridicule the fathers’ masculinity while exaggerating their stubbornness, selfishness and narrow-­mindedness. Meanwhile, the romance is downplayed and has little space to develop. The romantic love stories are so trivialized that the television drama shifts its focus quickly, even when there are opportunities to elaborate on and explore the complexity of emotions and relationships. One of the best examples is the crisis that happens in Zhao Yutian and Liu Ying’s marriage, when Zhao Yutian falls in love with Chen Yannan, a student doing her internship in the village. This plot could be fleshed out into a full-­blown love story, but in the drama it is only briefly mentioned. In fact, Zhao’s affection for Chen, like many other incidents, quickly leads to a battle between his father and his wife’s father, and audience members never actually get to know Zhao Yutian’s and his wife’s true feelings, even when they get a divorce. Zhao Yutian and Liu Ying eventually remarry after they realize Liu Ying is pregnant, but it is their fathers who come together to work on the reconciliation first. Most of the conversations between the spouses, no matter in which household, are about the fathers—how the fathers want to take advantage of the pregnancies of their daughters or daughters-­in-law and host a feast to collect gift money from the guests, or how they want to become village officials and gain economic and civil power and privilege. Even the misunderstandings over the relationships are caused by the fathers’ fears of losing control of their daughter-­ in-law or son-­in-law, not by concerns for their son or daughter’s true happiness.

Women in rural romantic love   143 In this off-­topic representation of so-­called romantic love, women are completely silent. Their silence is represented as either a virtue (they are stoical and strong) or as an expression of filial piety (they are obedient and understanding), both coming from their inner strength and kindness. Janice Radway has argued that audience members often find emotional relief and sustenance when they observe the development of relationships in romances in which they can identify with the protagonists who solve their problems and find love. One reason put forward to explain the appeal of romances to some female audience members is that the fantasy of developing a relationship eases the anxiety, toil and boredom viewers deal with on a daily basis (Radway 1991, p.  93). However, Rural Romantic Love Stories never gives the women in the story (and therefore the female audience) this temporary and imagined agency and power.

The non-­existence of romantic love and gendered entrepreneurship Rural Romantic Love Stories does not appear willing to follow the conventions and expectations of the romance genre because it arises from patriarchal control of the production of content. In series one, Xie Yongqiang refuses to propose to Wang Xiaomeng until he is sure his dream of owning his own orchard and managing the hot spring business will take off; Zhao Yutian cannot marry Liu Ying until he demolishes his father’s storage house and starts his own flower nursery; Liu Yishui cannot think about romance until he realizes that to develop a successful farm, he needs Xiaomei’s assistance; and so on. All the love interests are connected because of the woman’s important role in helping the man realize his dream of becoming an entrepreneur. The hero’s relationship with the heroine guarantees the beginning of a thriving business. Similarly, the fathers’ attitudes towards their children’s relationships and marriages are based on considerations about who will help the son bring wealth and respect to the family. The representation of marriage thus shows it as a utilitarian and rational choice and there is little time spent exploring the complex emotions that romantic love might involve. The emphasis on and celebration of entrepreneurship is reflected in the young men’s lives, especially in the dramatic changes in the villagers’ perceptions of the main protagonist, Xie Yongqiang. Because he is a new college graduate, everyone in the community respects him and expects him to be a promising official. But Xie Yongqiang’s dream of working as a communist cadre in the municipal education department fails and his job as an elementary school teacher is portrayed as an intellectual and emotional torment. Although he passes the required national exam, he chooses to stay in the village and continue with his plan to manage his orchard, even though that offers an uncertain future. Entrepreneurship becomes an essential element of masculinity and the only path to a promising and affluent life. Being an entrepreneur is an indispensable and important element of masculinity in a positive and healthy relationship and marriage, because it gives couples not only a financial foundation but also a life purpose and a shared goal.

144   Huike Wen Entrepreneurship is so naturally embedded and idealized in the imagination of rural people’s lives that it becomes the daily reality in the fictional Ivory Mountain Village. It seems that as long as the young people take risks and work hard (often sacrificing their family time and relationships), they will be successful and have better lives. The family is often a problem in this process but in the end the couples reconcile, and every series ends with a happy family as a unit of kinship and a friendly village as recognition of community. Meanwhile, the women’s sacrifices ensure harmony for the families and village. All the male protagonists evolve from penniless, immature, unprepared young men to middle-­aged, wealthy, powerful and contributing entrepreneurs. Yet, despite changes in their appearance and attire, the wives essentially remain the same young girls they were in series one—caring, filial, willing to wait. The only successful woman entrepreneur, Wang Xiaomeng, who develops her father’s tofu business and creates jobs for young women, is given no opportunity to evolve or to talk about how hard it is to manage the business. Her entrepreneurship, a smooth and unchallenging process, relies on men’s contributions: her father’s foundation of a high-­quality product and his reputation as running an honest business and being the most respected man in the village; guidance from a male classmate and family friend, Liu Yishui; development help from Wang Bing, a successful businessman; and, of course, the eventual support of her husband. Meanwhile, all the male entrepreneurs, including her husband, are shown as having started out with nothing, building their businesses up with their bare hands. They often confront challenges from business competitors and family members. Wang Xiaomeng is challenged only once, when she cannot get pregnant as easily as other young women in the village; but, in the end, she has twins, who serve in the narration as a reward for her filial piety to her parents and in-­laws and her kindness to their adopted son. While men are exploring and having adventures, women are helping and keeping families united, so the village residents can catch up with and even surpass the living standards of urban dwellers. Meanwhile, depicting their miserable failures in romantic relationships and marriages, individuals such as Wang Xiangxiu, who wants to move to the city, and Li Hu, who owns a small urban construction team, are discursively criticized and literally punished because their desires tarnish their loyalty to and love of the village. The portrayal of the gender roles and the common responsibilities of both genders in the romantic love stories expresses the superiority of so-­called traditions. While Western literature in general and the romance genre in particular celebrate the individual, in Rural Romantic Love Stories the characters’ Chineseness leads them to protect and celebrate familial and communal values and integrity. As a result, Rural Romantic Love Stories illustrates how the media is simultaneously both a product and a reinforcement of the governmental, mainstream ideology of self-­realization and communal responsibility in China. The (non-) existence of romantic love that aims to empower women and/or help them deal with stress and suppression in Rural Romantic Love Stories reflects a long history of the use of romantic love to convey moral, national, individual and

Women in rural romantic love   145 communal values and responsibilities in Chinese media and culture. Moreover, represented as an economically and technologically less developed ‘other’, the rural areas carry ‘traditions’ that encapsulate patriarchal beliefs and the practices of gender roles and gender relationships. Therefore, to examine the portrayal of these roles and relationships, we must review the representation of romantic love in rural areas since the early twentieth century in modern China.

Bachelors in China The masculine utopia of Rural Romantic Love Stories ignores a striking reality in Chinese rural areas—the large number of bachelors who are reluctantly leading a single life. These men are often desperate to find a wife in the countryside but lack the opportunity to do so. According to official statistics, China’s population in 2016 was 1,378,670,000: 708,150,000 men and 674,560,000 women (National Bureau of Statistics of People’s Republic of China 2016). The sex ratio is decreasing compared to 2000 yet remains very unbalanced. It is predicted that by 2020 approximately 30 million men will not be able to find wives. As Mara Hvistendahl (2011) has pointed out, this demographic trend is both directly and indirectly relevant to potential chaos and instability in Chinese society, just as it was in late nineteenth-­century China and has been in many other times and places throughout history. In the past five years, many journalists have reported on the bachelor villages that exist in many rural areas, both in the south, where economic reform started earlier, and in the north, where industrial restructuring happened much later (Branigan 2011; Levine 2013; Williams 2016). Rural bachelors lack the economic capacity and social status to compete with single men in urban areas, who are often closer to better-­paid jobs and pools of marriageable women. Some of these bachelors say that the villages’ isolation stops women from considering moving to them. Some rural bachelors also argue that needing to take care of elderly relatives and family members prevents them from moving away and finding more opportunities, in terms of financial and human resources, to get married. Many of those living in rural areas thought their problems were caused by their own geographical locations and economic conditions. They are not aware that their problems are widespread in China, the result of the shift from an agrarian to an industrial and consumer economy. The comments of these villagers also reflect a lack of realization that being single in a bachelor village results in more than just loneliness and not having children to inherit the family name. The large number of ‘reluctant’ or involuntary bachelors has shaped a new social class, referred to by journalist Jessica Levine (2013) as the ‘new bachelor class’, which is facing mental health concerns—a loss of motivation and self-­realization in despair at not having a ‘normal’ life. Rural bachelors are probably the most eager of all single individuals in China to make a new start and change their lives by marrying. Stories about their desires and struggles to find women to marry, as well as those of the few women who choose to stay in the countryside, would certainly present a different

146   Huike Wen p­ erspective on what love could be and provide an alternative definition of love and relationships in Chinese media. Nonetheless, the depiction of romantic, marital and sexual relationships in the countryside has never truly considered the lives, imagined or real, of these rural citizens. Rural Romantic Love Stories, despite its apparent realism (the dialect, the actors’ performances, the narrations of individuals’ conflicts and emotions and the scenes of typical north-­eastern Chinese villages), never recognizes the existence of these bachelors or addresses the fact that many female villagers would rather be maids in comparatively wealthier urban families than housewives in the countryside (Sun 2008). The absence of such men and women from countryside-­themed television dramas reflects the mainstream Chinese media’s collective neglect of the emotional needs, such as for love and romance, of members of disadvantaged social groups. At the same time, this absence helps promote an illusion of happiness, harmony and hope consistent with neoliberal ideology. Unsurprisingly, Rural Romantic Love Stories has received both positive and negative reactions from viewers. The comments reflect social expectations on normative masculinity and femininity. YouTube viewers tend to praise the beauty and virtues of the women in the village and say they enjoy laughing at the ridiculous troubles and situations created by the men.8 Scholarly commentators often discuss the factors that have increased the drama’s viewership and popularity and generally agree on three points. First, the show is down to earth and realistic. Second, it is funny and light in tone and therefore very easy to understand. Third, it exposes the flaws of ‘little people’ (people who do not possess very much political and economic power yet want to feel more important than their peers) (Bai 2011; Yang 2014; Zeng 2012). As a result, the stories make the audience, especially men who are struggling in a stressful social environment, feel sympathy towards—as well as superiority over—the characters. The responses from the audience suggest that Rural Romantic Love Stories successfully fulfils its goal of attracting and sustaining viewers’ interest by constructing utopias specifically created from the masculine perspective in the mainstream media. The series does not challenge viewers with any surprising or unconventional perspectives; instead, the drama encourages them to imagine characters’ lives that are filled with tedium but where those characters also have the opportunity to climb the ladder personally and professionally.

Conclusion Romantic love as it is usually defined in Western culture and modern Asian and Chinese culture does not exist in Rural Romantic Love Stories. This is not surprising, given that the representation of romantic love in the Chinese media has always been heavily coloured by political ideology and national values. Nonetheless, what makes Rural Romantic Love Stories worthy of examination is that while it claims to focus on romantic love in the countryside, the drama in fact spends only a minimal amount of time and narration on romance. The analysis I

Women in rural romantic love   147 have presented in this chapter shows that the communication and relationship between the heroes and heroines has only two purposes: (1) to create connections between the fathers (they are either in-­laws or friends), causing conflict between them and therefore creating comical moments; and (2) to associate masculinity with a celebration of successful entrepreneurship. At the same time, unlike the romantic stories by metropolitan writers and directors, which often reflect individuals’ struggles and anxieties, the rural-­romance stories express two messages: they reflect the urgent need for rural residents to change and catch up with their urban peers; and they demonstrate the importance of preserving traditional community values. These messages are not only contradictory but also apparently in conflict with the romantic adventure of modern love stories in which protagonists explore possibilities, enjoy freedom and focus on individual self-­realization. But stories such as Rural Romantic Love Stories also reflect a Chineseness that has been consistently re-­emphasized in romance-­ themed television programmes in recent Chinese media. The drama is in fact more like a romance about village men’s utopian life, as the name ‘Ivory Mountain Village’ suggests. Similar to an ‘Ivory Tower’, where students and intellectuals study and reflect without being interrupted by the complexity of social reality, there are no social and/or political issues for the villagers to deal with. All the problems come from the men’s desires and quests for self-­realization. Running in parallel with this narrative of men’s romance, viewers follow young men’s travels along the path to becoming entrepreneurs. Women’s dreams are not explored. As a result, the drama is really not a countryside romantic love story, as the title claims. So why then is the title Rural Romantic Love Stories? Romantic love appears in the title to signal to viewers what this drama is not—it is not state propaganda, a communist party member’s heroic saga or a reflection on the reality of rural life. At the same time, the title also suggests that this is a drama about everyday life and human desires. Paradoxically or strategically, the series echoes and promotes the dominant ideology, encouraging neoliberal ideas of self-­management, self-­realization, self-­reflection, individual and communal development and, therefore, a definition of a happy, contented and harmonious society—a Chineseness that is superior to Western or hyper-­ globalized subjectivities.

Notes 1 Film studies scholars Yingjin Zhang (1996) and Shuqin Cui (2003) have both argued, in great detail, that women were used as symbols of national backwardness and problems in 1930s Shanghai films, and the symbolic annotation extends to socialist films. 2 Yue Meng (1993) examined the story of Bai Maonü, pointing out that the character of the white-­haired girl, Xi’er, was altered several times from the 1950s to the 1970s, and that her pregnancy and the birth of her child disappeared altogether in the ballet version in the 1970s, with the aim of highlighting class struggle and de-­emphasizing the relationship between Xi’er and the landlord who sexually assaulted her. Women’s sexuality and gender are both politicized in this type of story.

148   Huike Wen 3 Dwelling Narrowness, a television drama first aired in 2009 that generated controversial discussions about gendered desires, power and urban space, is one of the few stories that made an effort to examine women’s views and values in post-­socialist Chinese television. It was written by Liu Liu, a woman writer who lived in Singapore and travelled frequently to China and overseas (Wen 2014; Yu 2011). See Chapter 5 for more information about Liu Liu’s works. 4 Eva Illouz (1997) has examined how romantic love has been deeply influenced by, as well as embedded in, capitalism, space, daily practice, ideology and much more. 5 Wanning Sun’s studies of rural migrants in post-­socialist Chinese cities often discuss the influences of the hukou policy on social equality in modern China. Her studies focus on how policies on social, educational and economic mobility disadvantage the rural population (Sun 2008, 2014; Sun and Chio 2012; Sun and Guo 2013). 6 Many of the countryside-­themed television dramas focus on praising officials who sacrifice their happiness, families and lives for the greater good of the local peasants and workers. For example, Xin Xing (Taiyuan TV, 1986), Kong Fansen (Shandong, XiZang TV and CCTV, 1995), Jiao Yulu (Shanghai Film and Zhejiang TV and Film Company, 2013) and the many other television dramas depicting women leaders. 7 For example, Yang Liping, the most well-­known dancer in China, has chosen her identity as a Bai-­minority woman artist to entirely focus on producing and performing dances reflecting the Bai minority’s folklore, culture and life. After about ten years, her dancing troupe evolved into a media company (in 2013). Her company is often used as an example of a successful business and entrepreneurship. Jin Xing, a modern dancer widely known as a TV talk show host and reality TV judge, also turned her dance troupe (established in 1999) into a company that trains its own dancers and, since 2006, has had its own theatre. Many of these types of celebrity-­owned companies (Mingxing Qiye) gained more freedom to explore possibilities around 2010. For the stories of these companies, please refer to Zhongguo Qiyejia Wang (2014). 8 Below are some examples of the audience’s comments on the drama:  • ‘Xiao Meng is very beautiful.’ www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbCc3TBF8fY&list= PLIAEYhABWdDdqRiD27SP7xvOpOlVSRxeB&index=2. • ‘Liu Ying is so kind that she is almost foolish. She makes people feel sorry and they love her dearly.’ www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXJmXlmoqTk&list=PLIAE YhABWdDcQeuLnfqgsXcV_qOLgcgcE&index=38. • ‘Poor mountains and troubled water raise unruly people. [The drama)] is almost 90 per cent real to the life of lower-­class Chinese people. Not bad, not bad.’ www. youtube.com/watch?v=Aur9OmZu0sA&list=PL1VcGd54nFQ87pqyBQfzEhmfTwqbb_7Y.  • ‘These conflicts among people look … naïve yet reflect the nature of human beings. The women represent the beautiful virtues of Chinese women—these women are hard workers, kind, understanding, docile yet brave enough to pursue their own happiness.’ www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NSadX-K_1o&list=PLIAEY hABWdDfn4jefSL5tIGct2oJSHDdo.

References Bai, Pengfei. 2011. ‘Pushi zhong de xiangcun aiqing gushi—Xiangcun aiging xilie dianshiju de chenggong zhi dao’ [The Simple Rural Love Stories—Analyses of Rural Romantic Love Stories Series’ Success]. Dianying pingjie [Movie Review] 15: 74–77.

Women in rural romantic love   149 Branigan, Tania. 2011. ‘China’s Village of the Bachelors: No Wives in Sight in Remote Settlement’. Guardian, 2 September. www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/02/china-­ village-of-­bachelors (accessed 23 September 2017). CCTV. 2017. ‘Comedian Zhao Benshan’. www.cctv.com/tvonline/special/C17276/01/ (accessed 23 September 2017). China Cultural Industry Association. 2017. ‘Benshan Media Company’. www.chncia.org/ huiyuan/m41-78.html (accessed 23 September 2017). Chio, Jenny and Harrell, Stevan. 2014. A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Cui, Shuqin. 2003. Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Hvistendahl, Mara. 2011. Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. New York: Public Affairs. Illouz, Eva. 1997. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jing, Kaixuan. 2007. ‘Contemporary Chinese Fiction: Politics and Romance’. Macalester International 18 (11). http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/macintl/vol. 18/ iss1/11. Levine, Jessica. 2013. ‘China’s New Bachelor Class’. The Atlantic, 11 February. www. theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/chinas-­new-bachelor-­class/273040/ (accessed 23 September 2017). Lewis, Tania, Martin, Fran and Sun, Wanning. (eds.). 2016. Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Li, Yongqiang. 2016. ‘Mo rang nongcunju chengwei bei “yiwang de jiaoluo” ’ [Don’t Let Countryside Themed TV Dramas Become the ‘Forgotten Corner’]. Guangming Daily, 11 June. Meng, Yue. 1993. ‘Female Images and National Myth.’ In: Gender Politics in Modern China, edited by T. E. Barlow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 119–136. National Bureau of Statistics of People’s Republic of China. 2016. ‘Chapter Two: Population’. www.stats.gov.cn/ztjc/ztsj/jzgjlhtjsc/jz2017/201709/t20170901_1530133.html (accessed 3 September 2017). Price, Ronald Francis. 2005. Education in Modern China. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Radway, Janice. 1991. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Regis, Pamela. 2007. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sun, Wanning. 2008. Maid in China: Media, Morality, and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries. London and New York: Routledge. Sun, Wanning. 2014. Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices. London: Roman & Littlefield. Sun, Wanning and Chio, Jenny. (eds.). 2012. Mapping Media in China: Region, Province, Locality. London and New York: Routledge. Sun, Wanning and Guo, Yingjie. (eds.). 2013. Unequal China: The Political Economy and Cultural Politics of Inequality. London and New York: Routledge. Wang, Ban. 2011. ‘Understanding the Chinese Revolution through Words: An Introduction’. In: Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution, edited by Ban Wang. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, pp. 1–14.

150   Huike Wen Wang, Guangyi. 2008. Zhongguo chubenye gaige: lilun shijian yu tansuo [The Reform of the Chinese Publishing Industry: Theoretical Practice and Exploration]. Beijing: China Financial & Economic Publishing House. Wang, Meng. 2009. ‘Zhao Benshan de “wenhua geming” ’ [Zhao Benshan’s ‘Culture Revolution’]. Du Shu [Reading] 4: 146–150. Wen, Huike. 2014. ‘Slaves of the House and Victims of Love: New Life and Relationship Challenges in Dwelling Narrowness’. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 29: 35–57. Williams, Sophie. 2016. ‘China’s Bachelor Crisis is Getting Worse: Expensive Weddings Lead to Even More Single Men in the Country’. Daily Mail Online, 25 February. www. dailymail.co.uk/news/peoplesdaily/article-­3463907/China-­s-bachelor-­crisis-getting-­ worse-Expensive-­weddings-lead-­single-men-­country.html (accessed 23 September 2017). Yan, Hairong. 2008. New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yang, Pingping. 2014. ‘Lun Xiangcun aiqing xilieju de chengong yu buzu’ [The Success and Flaws of Rural Romantic Love Stories]. Chongqing yu shijie [Chongqing and the World] 6: 103–105. Yu, Haiqing. 2011. ‘Dwelling Narrowness: Chinese Media and Their Disingenuous Neoliberal Logic’. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 25: 33–46. Zeng, Yiguo. 2012. ‘Chongjian xiangcun shehui de xiwang yu weiji—you Xingcun aiqing xilie gushi tanqi’ [The Hope and Crisis of Rebuilding Rural Community—A Discussion Initiated by Rural Romantic Love Stories]. Zhongguo dianshi [Chinese Television] 7: 25–30. Zhang, Xinying. 2012. ‘Nongcun ticai dianshiju zhong de nüxing xingxiang jiqi wenhua yiyi’ [Images of Women and Their Cultural Connotations in Countryside Themed TV Dramas]. Shandong shifan daxue xuebao [Journal of Shandong Normal University] 4: 151–160. Zhang, Yingjin. 1996. The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zhang, Zhenyang and Song, Shoushan. 2009. Qiyejia Zhao Benshan [A Celebrated Entrepreneur, Zhao Benshan]. Hangzhou: Zhejiang People’s Press.  Zhong, Xueping. 2000. Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zhongguo Qiyejia Wang. 2014. ‘Yang Liping “kongque shangdao”: Shenchuangtou muhou tuishou yinian jingli 1400 wan’ [Yang Liping’s “Peacock Business”: Shenchuang Investment Company Helps Her Earn 14 Million RMB Net Income in a Year]. iceo.com.cn, 7 February. www.iceo.com.cn/guanli2013/2014/0207/274779.shtml (accessed 31 May 2019).

9 Tiny Times, persistent love Gender, class and relationships in post-­ 1980s bestsellers Ling Yang

Introduction Despite their tremendous literary and cultural influence in China, the post-­1980s writers as a group have been curiously ignored in English-­language scholarship. While research on contemporary Chinese youth (Clark 2012; Cockain 2012; de Kloet and Fung 2017; Liu 2011) frequently evokes the label ‘post-­80s generation’ (80 hou), that is, the generation born after 1980, it rarely dwells on the literary production of this cohort. Although Han Han (b. 1982) and Guo Jingming (b. 1983), as the Janus face of the ‘post-­80s generation’, have individually or together received critical attention from humanities scholars (Chau 2015; Fumian 2009, 2010; Henningsen 2010; Strafella and Berg 2015; Zhang 2016), they are rarely discussed in connection with other post-­1980s writers, many of whom ‘remain largely unknown in the West’ (Song and Yang 2016, p. vii). This chapter intends to fill this research gap by focusing on the works of Guo Jingming and Zhang Jiajia (b. 1980), two well-­known post-­1980s writers, with the aim of exploring their representations of the emotional landscape of the urban, educated segment of Chinese youth. A best-­selling author, magazine editor, film director, television personality and cultural entrepreneur, Guo Jingming has blurred and crossed the boundaries between the worlds of literature, entertainment and business (Yang 2012). His trilogy Tiny Times (Xiao shidai, 2008, 2010, 2011) is arguably the most controversial and influential series of novels produced by the ‘post-­80s generation’, if controversy is regarded as a source and proof of influence. Unlike Guo Jingming’s decade-­long celebrity, Zhang Jiajia is a belated newcomer to the pantheon of post-­1980s literary stars. He became a household name on the internet when stories published on his Weibo account went viral in 2013. The print collection of those stories, I Belonged to You (Cong nide quanshijie luguo, literally ‘passing from your world’, 2013), had sold seven million copies as of 2016, making it the most sold stand-­alone fiction title in China in the past 20 years (Wei 2016). Since his big break in 2013, Zhang Jiajia has followed in the footsteps of Guo Jingming by directing a film adapted from his own story, establishing his own publishing company and guest starring on the popular dating show If You Are the One (Feicheng wurao).

152   Ling Yang In this chapter, I first discuss the fragmentation of the Chinese literary field since the beginning of the twenty-­first century to provide a general background to the rise of print-­based post-­1980s writers. I then offer a close reading of the interpersonal relationships between characters portrayed in Tiny Times and I Belonged to You through the dual lens of gender and class politics. Expressing a strong desire for a more egalitarian ‘pure relationship’ (Giddens 1992), both texts proffer a set of gender roles and relationship models that are more progressive than those promoted in other forms of media. Tiny Times embraces female aggressiveness, self-­control and cross-­class sisterhood as a way for young women to survive in a society of entrenched economic and gender inequality. At the same time, I Belonged to You fashions a defiantly sensitive and sentimental manhood and reinvents the cult of sentiment (qing) as an emotional shelter for the young middle-­class of both sexes who may be feeling alienated in the cut-­ throat competition of authoritarian capitalism. These changing literary representations of femininity and masculinity and the blurring of gender boundaries are accompanied by depictions of homosocial interaction and other forms of non-­ heterosexual desires and bonding. In this chapter I argue that by critically engaging with the writings of the post-­1980s, we are able to uncover emergent ‘structures of feeling’—social experiences that are still in formation and yet to be fully recognized (Williams 1977). Through this investigation we can gain a more nuanced understanding of the psychic life of the generations born in post-­ socialist China.

Post-­1980s writers and a tale of two markets It has become accepted as common sense by Chinese academia that there is not one single, monolithic literary field in today’s China, but several. Critic Bai Ye observes that there are three major forces in twenty-­first-century Chinese literature: serious literature published in established literary magazines; market-­ oriented literature such as youth literature (qingchun wenxue, also translated as ‘young adult literature’) published by commercial publishers; and internet literature published online (Bai 2006). Scholar Wang Xiaoming further divides China’s ‘literary map’ into two areas—print literature and internet literature— each of which consists of a number of sub-­areas (Wang 2011). The sea-­change in the Chinese literary field is undoubtedly associated with the rise of the post-­1980s writers, who first earned their fame and fortune in the book market at the turn of the century. The stunning commercial success of Han Han’s Triple Door (Sanchong men, 2000) and Guo Jingming’s Ice Fantasy (Huancheng, also translated as ‘City of Fantasy’, 2003) helped publishers discover a formerly untapped readership—well-­heeled urban teenagers and the first generation of only children under China’s one-­child policy. By 2004, the marketing label ‘youth literature’ had developed into a mature category in the book industry, referring to all literary works whose target readers were between 14 and 22 years of age (Open Book 2004). As two pioneers of youth literature, Han Han and Guo Jingming have also become the voice of the ‘post-­80s generation’,

Tiny Times, persistent love   153 speaking about their loneliness, anxieties, frustrations and discontent in coping with a rapidly changing society and new urban realities (Fumian 2009, 2010). Since the new millennium, the Chinese print literary market has been bolstered by writers and readers of youth literature. It is generally believed that Chinese adults are too busy making a living to immerse themselves in the escapist pleasures of literature. Only adolescents and young adults have the time and need for literature and many of them prefer youth literature to the traditional canon (Zhu 2007). Meanwhile, the popularization of high-­speed broadband internet in the early 2000s, along with the relatively lax state control of web publishing, led to a gigantic quantity of literary output being published on the internet. Although some scholars have grouped all Chinese-­language writing published ‘in an interactive online context’ under the rubric of ‘internet literature’ (wangluo wenxue) (Hockx 2015, p. 4), readers typically use the shortened term ‘wangwen’ to refer to original serialized genre fiction first released on the internet (Chao 2012, p.  13). This term excludes forms of web writing such as poetry and fanfiction that are less commercially viable and which are often circulated within specific communities. Works of internet fiction are widely perceived to be performative acts of ‘wish fulfilment’, allowing readers to fulfil their desires for power, wealth, sex and personal happiness through fantastic plot devices such as time travel and the supernatural (Chao 2012, Chapters 4 and 5; Inwood 2016, p. 438). Currently, China has 353 million readers of internet literature (CNNIC 2017, p. 43), constituting a group larger than the population of the United States. While the rank and file of these internet writers are now drawn from the post-­1990s generation, the most popular writers are still those of the ‘post-­80s generation’, largely because these older writers entered the field early and continue to enjoy the advantages of having been the first to move into the online publishing world. The digital reading market differs from the print literary market in a number of crucial ways. First of all, under the VIP (‘very important person’) pay-­perview system of commercial literary websites, internet writers have a strong incentive to produce long novels. The average length for novels available to VIP subscribers has reached over one million characters (Schleep 2015, p.  69), whereas print novels are usually limited to 100,000–200,000 characters. In order to attract a maximum number of readers, newbie web writers are often advised by their senior counterparts to forgo complex sentence structure, refined language and elaborate description, as those writing techniques are all considered unnecessary barriers to readers’ vicarious enjoyment of the plot. Due to concerns about print production costs and the more strenuous editing process, however, print writers still need to observe the principle of economy in writing and hence (in theory) pay more heed to their use of language. Internet literature is also an extremely gendered field. Male and female writers each write for readers of their own gender and develop gender-­specific genres, themes and narrative structures. For example, Qidian, the largest literature website in China, has been traditionally dominated by male writers and readers. In order to attract female writers and readers, Qidian first established a ‘Girls’ Channel’ and then expanded it into an

154   Ling Yang independent women-­oriented website in 2009 (Feng 2013, p.  27). In contrast, print literary works, regardless of the gender of the authors, are most likely to be consumed by female readers, judging from the gender ratio of online book reviews and offline book signing events. The ‘teenaging’ of the print readership, coupled with the massive appeal of digital reading, has had a profound impact on print-­based post-­1980s writing. Two visible changes are the thematic shift from sex to relationships and from heterosexuality to more diverse and non-­normative forms of sociality. The avant-­garde fictions of the 1980s and the mode of ‘body writing’ (shenti xiezuo) practised by some female writers in the 1990s and early 2000s are all famed for their bold treatment of sex, sexuality and erotic desire (Yang 2011). Jia Pingwa’s Ruined City (Feidu, 1993) and Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby (Shanghai baobei, 1999) were even banned by the government because of their explicit sex scenes. Such direct depictions of sex acts, however, have collectively disappeared from print-­based post-­ 1980s writing, not because this generation of writers is no longer interested in sex, but because they have good reasons to refrain from writing about it. For one thing, writers need to avoid publishing any content that could be judged inappropriate for the teenage readers who constitute the largest portion of their readership. This principally means avoiding explicit scenes of sex and violence that might raise the eyebrows of protective parents, not to mention school authorities and the patriarchal state. Another reason is that the censorship of print publications has always been much tighter than internet censorship. The internet is already crowded with adult content, despite continuous campaigns by the Chinese government against online pornography. Since they can neither imitate nor surpass their internet competitors on the subject of sex, print-­based writers have instead turned their attention to the mystery of human relationships and the intimate experience of attachment and loss in a changing world. While print-­based post-­1980s writers might have adopted a different approach to the issue of sex as a strategy of market differentiation, they share the same desire as internet writers to experiment with unconventional gender roles and sexuality in their writings. For instance, both print and web writers have shown a great interest in homosexuality, a taboo subject in socialist China. The web genre of danmei (Boys’ Love), a type of male–male same sex love story, and its opposite baihe (Girls’ Love) have each drawn loyal followings, mostly among young women and sexual minorities. Danmei, in particular, has evolved from a small underground fandom into an influential subculture and has made a significant contribution to the increased social recognition and tolerance of non-­ normative sexuality (Lavin et al. 2017). Although the open description of homosexuality is rare in print-­based post-­1980s writing, the vivid portrayal of intimate homosocial bonding has become commonplace. Leading post-­1980s writers such as Guo Jingming, Zhang Yueran, Luo Luo (aka Zhao Jiarong) and Qi Jin Nian (aka Zhao Qin) are all known for their depictions of chemistry between two young male or female characters (Lin 2006; Wei 2007). In addition, it is widely known that some male writers of youth literature, including Guo Jingming and An Dong Ni (aka Ma Liang), have non-­normative sexual

Tiny Times, persistent love   155 identities. It might not therefore be simply a marketing gambit or queer baiting that in Tiny Times Guo Jingming not only creates a flamboyant gay character but portrays two female protagonists as veteran danmei fans. Regardless of their choice of publishing platform, the post-­1980s writers have, by and large, enthusiastically embraced internet technology and social media. Before his transformation into a bestselling print writer, Guo Jingming frequented the first Chinese literary website, ‘Under the Banyan Tree’. In the early stages of his career, he used the internet as a literary training ground to polish his writing skills and build a network of literary friends. A couple of his online friends later became key members of his publishing company. Recently, he has used Weibo, the Twitter-­like social networking site, to launch cost-­ effective advertising campaigns for his own films. As mentioned above, Zhang Jiajia published his stories for free on Weibo before turning them into a print book. Weibo has brought him both overdue celebrity and a solid fan base. Like Guo Jingming, he has used Weibo both to promote his works and to engage with followers. 1

Tiny Times: inequality, femininity and sisterhood Set in Shanghai, the Tiny Times trilogy revolves around four young women who have been bosom friends for many years, despite their different socio-­economic backgrounds and personalities. The leader of the clique, Gu Li, is the beloved daughter of a successful businessman. Lin Xiao and Tang Wanru are both from a ‘xiaokang family’, the moderately prosperous lower middle class. The beautiful and talented Nan Xiang, however, comes from the lowest stratum of society, as her drug-­addicted mother has brought financial ruin upon the family. Apart from dealing with the four protagonists’ transitions from college to workplace, the series focuses primarily on the ups and downs of their personal relationships, particularly their friendship. Since the release of the first novel in the series, The Times of Origami (Zhezhi shidai, 2008), Tiny Times has been interpreted as ‘an ode’ to Shanghai—the global capital city (Huang 2011) and complacent imagination of the new Shanghainese—an outsider-­turned-insider, middle-­class identity forged through the accumulation of economic and cultural capital and conspicuous consumption (Huang and Dong 2017). Yet a closer look at the trilogy’s descriptive passages about Shanghai reveals something quite different. The Times of Origami opens with a panoramic view of Shanghai that highlights the class and racial inequality of this cosmopolitan city: the rushing white collar workers and the shabby beggars in the subway, the leisurely white businessmen and the busy Chinese customers at Starbucks, the empty upmarket retailers and the crowded streets in the Bund,2 the rich mansion-­dwelling ladies and the poor nongtang (alley) women (Guo 2008, p.  4). Such a glamorous and contrastive picture of Shanghai is followed by a commentary that reads: ‘It’s a dagger-­sharp cold era. It cuts one hole after another in the human heart, and then buries a ticking bomb into it. The extreme disparity between the haves and have-­nots really tears the human soul apart’ (Guo 2008, p. 5).

156   Ling Yang These images of destructive weapons and mangled human heart effectively expose the devastating human toll of decades of ruthless growth that mostly benefits the rich and the powerful. Unlike many contemporary women writers ‘from Wang Anyi to Mian Mian and Wei Hui’ that render Shanghai ‘as the most feminine of Chinese cities’ (Schaffer and Song 2014, p. 108), in Tiny Times, Guo’s Shanghai is neither feminine nor masculine, but monstrous. Lin Xiao once sarcastically remarked: ‘Whenever I think about Shanghai, I have in my mind a picture of a giant monster of reinforced concrete and broken glasses endlessly devouring food’ (Guo 2010, p.  221). The monster never stops chewing ‘because there is always a steady stream of people who get lost in this glittering age and offer the monster their souls and bodies’ (Guo 2010, p. 221). One reading of Guo’s descriptions is of this voracious monster as a metaphor for global capitalism that has sapped the vigour of generations of Chinese workers in the name of ‘a better life’. Tiny Times’ cynical attitude towards the economic situation of Shanghai and the fate of the social elites is borne out most graphically in the cover image for its last volume The Times of Piercing the Golden Veil (Cijin shidai, Guo 2011), in which the Shanghai Oriental Pearl TV Tower, a phallic landmark of the city, is erected straight and upright on a turbulent sea, as if to proclaim that the financial centre of China will continue to flourish no matter what happens. Nevertheless, this miraculous rise is represented as merely an optical illusion because the surface of the sea is tilted at an angle. An adjustment of the angle shows that the tower is actually about to fall over. By the end of the last novel, the dream life of the middle class finally turns into a nightmare, as Gu Li, Tang Wanru and Nan Xiang all die in a fire. After the fire, Lin Xiao quits her job at the multinational corporation, leaves Shanghai and rebuilds her life from scratch. The fictional ending of the series is based on a real Shanghai fire in 2010 that destroyed a 28-storey apartment building, killing at least 58 people. It was the largest fire disaster the city had witnessed since 1949. The burnt building is located in the affluent Jing’an District, the heart of old Shanghai, not far from the headquarters of Guo Jingming’s company. This fire can be read as symbolizing the deepest fear and anxiety of China’s rich class—‘all that is solid melts into air’, to borrow the famous quote from The Communist Manifesto. Besides the series’ provocative title of Tiny Times, a title that blatantly contradicts the official discourse of ‘a great country’ and ‘great times’, phrases such as ‘tiny and hazy’ (weimang), ‘tiny and minute’ (weixiao) and ‘tiny and insignificant’ (miaoxiao) occur repeatedly throughout the series. One celebrated passage articulated by the pop idol writer Zhou Chongguang, Guo Jingming’s alter ego in the series, claims that ‘we are all tiny stars’ and ‘our existence is more insignificant than cosmic dust’. Despite all the setbacks, Guo writes ‘we are still making a tiny effort in great despair’ (Guo 2008, p. 108). As if to fight against this prevailing sense of helplessness, Guo creates the character of Gu Li, an aggressive and aspiring young woman who is determined to take control of her own life regardless of circumstances. Although raised in the lap of luxury, Gu Li is not the stereotypical second-­ generation rich kid who only knows how to flaunt the wealth she has not earned.

Tiny Times, persistent love   157 To realize her career goal as a certified accountant, she has lived a disciplined life and turned herself into a well-­groomed ‘high-­functioning computer’ that is always rational, precise and in control. Similar to the ‘enterprising self ’ cultivated in Western societies as analyzed by Nikolas Rose (1996, p. 154), Gu Li treats her life like an enterprise and tries to maximize the human capital she invests in herself, so that she can become what she wishes to be. It is gradually disclosed in the series that Gu Li has suffered many hardships in her seemingly luxurious life. When she was in high school, she was drugged and raped by the unruly boyfriend of her friend Nan Xiang. Her relationship with her high school sweetheart Gu Yuan is opposed by his domineering mother. Her father unexpectedly dies in a car accident on her birthday. When she takes over the family business, she finds out that it is in serious financial trouble. She also learns she has ovarian cancer. In spite of this legion of difficulties, Gu Li manages to recover both her family assets and her personal health with resilience, determination and the help of her friends and gay cousin. It is with her friends that the icy, bossy, brand-­name obsessed Gu Li reveals her caring side. While she competes for career advancement opportunities with her boyfriend Gu Yuan ‘like a black widow spider that eats her own mate’, as the latter jokes, she is always ready to lend a helping hand to her friends. When Tang Wanru is publicly humiliated by her rival in love, Gu Li immediately comes to Wanru’s rescue with her sharp tongue. When Nan Xiang is arrested by police for buying drugs for her mother, Gu Li does all she can to secure Nan Xiang’s early release. When Nan Xiang has difficulty finding a job, Gu Li assists her in a way that avoids hurting her pride. To help her friends save money, Gu Li rents a large house and lives with her friends for years. Near the end of the series, it is also Gu Li’s friends who save her life. When she desperately needs a rare blood donor during a crucial surgical operation, Nan Xiang offers her own blood, literally sealing their sisterhood in blood. Female same-­sex attachment used to be an important literary theme in fiction published during the May Fourth movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s, an anti-­imperialist and anti-­traditional movement (Sang 2003). Since the 1980s, Chinese women writers have renewed their exploration of the ties between women and have considered female alliance a powerful weapon against patriarchal oppression (Han 2001). Nonetheless, fiction has typically shown female bonding as often disrupted by heterosexual marriage and motherhood. Once women marry, they are represented as inevitably prioritizing marital and parent– child relationships over same-­sex friendships (Li 2010). In Tiny Times the four friends each enter into romantic relationships with boys. While these relationships affect the women’s friendship more or less negatively, even at times threatening it, none of the relationships is powerful enough to drive the four apart. Over time, the boyfriends who stay all become part of this close-­knit sisterhood. Through the character of Gu Li, Tiny Times offers a refreshing take on the issues of femininity and relationships in urban China. Aside from the excessive care Gu Li takes with her appearance, she has none of the traditional virtues of Chinese women—obedience, chastity and modesty. Her aggressive behaviours

158   Ling Yang in daily life recall the feminine aggression that first caught the Chinese public’s imagination through the Korean romantic comedy film My Sassy Girl (2001), a transnational blockbuster hit (Wang and Ho 2007). Gu Li’s cool-­headed and disciplined aggressiveness is, however, rather different from the emotional aggressiveness and physical violence of the sassy Korean girl. Beneath her hyper-­feminine make-­up and expensive designer outfits, Gu Li is perhaps more akin, in spirit, to the androgynous, cosmopolitan and successful persona of China’s music idol Li Yuchun (see Chapter 14, this volume). Both embody a certain type of female masculinity, ‘an alternative to conventional femininity as well as hegemonic masculinity’ (Huang 2013, p. 145). Gu Li’s fierce independence and self-­reliance also set her apart from material girls who are willing to trade their youth and sexuality for financial security provided by wealthy men (Zurndorfer 2016). More importantly, Gu Li’s audacious pursuit of career success and material comfort, the mutual care and support among her friends, as well as their practice of communal living, all suggest that it is possible for single women of means to live a meaningful and fulfilling life without adhering to the ideal of heterosexual coupledom that often entails a rigid gender script. Instead of competing with one another for ‘scarce men’ and relying on men economically and emotionally (Li 2015), young women are shown as able to band together and build their own social support network. This last point is obviously well received by Tiny Times’ most devoted readers, girls born in the 1990s and 2000s. These fans have set up a Baidu Gu Li Bar, an online fan forum, to discuss Gu Li’s personality and fashion style, imitate her way of speaking and create fan works based on her image in the series and in its filmic adaptation. To explore the emotional bonding between Gu Li and her friends, many fanfics pair her up with either Nan Xiang or Lin Xiao and treat them as same sex lovers, even though in the original series all three characters have boyfriends. In his last interview, simply titled ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, Michel Foucault ‘invoked friendship as an alternative form of intimacy, a utopian space beyond the constraints of marriage and the family’ (Love 2007, p. 76). Tiny Times might be read as an effort in that direction, an innovative imagination of female friendship as a way of life and a gesturing towards new forms of subjectivity, belonging and alliance.

I Belonged to You: love, masculinity and class While Guo Jingming aspires to compose a ‘song of youth’ in ‘tiny times’, Zhang Jiajia initially wrote the stories in I Belonged to You merely to console himself. A graduate of the prestigious Nanjing University, since his college years Zhang Jiajia has worked as a television producer, screenwriter, novelist and columnist. In July 2011 he made a spectacular marriage proposal to his girlfriend, a model, live on a television show about newlyweds and the two were married by the end of the month. The marriage, however, lasted only one year. To heal his broken heart, Zhang Jiajia started to post ‘bedtime stories’ on his Weibo account in June 2012. The wild popularity of those stories prompted him to publish a collection

Tiny Times, persistent love   159 of his Weibo writings under the title I Belonged to You in November 2013, and the book became an instant bestseller. At first glance, the bestseller seems to be all about the complicated romantic relationships of the ‘post-­80s generation’ (Zeng 2014). The opening piece, ‘I Belonged to You’, tells the story of Mao Shiba, an electronics technician who can churn out nonsense non-­stop in the virtual world but is extremely shy and silent in the real world. After his girlfriend complains that the voice of her GPS navigator is too robotic, Mao Shiba replaces it with his own voice and turns the navigation device into a hilarious chatterbox. He also records an audio message of love onto the device. Yet his girlfriend never gets a chance to hear it because she breaks up with him shortly after he presents her with the remodelled navigator as a birthday gift. Similarly, Xiao Yu, the female protagonist in the story ‘Ferryman’, also suffers from the pain of unrequited love. A gentle, quiet girl, Xiao Yu falls in love with a young painter, Ma Li. She spends all her savings buying Ma Li’s work, takes care of him when he goes through the emotional turmoil of divorce and even risks her life to win a bizarre drinking competition on his behalf. When she realizes that Ma Li is still in love with his ex-­wife, she moves to another city and is still single at the end of the story. While some relationships end in sorrow, others have a happy ending after various twists and turns. In ‘I Hope There Is a Person Like You’, Guan Chun, the owner of a small bar, is devastated when his girlfriend Mao Mao leaves him for a richer and older man. Yet when he learns that Mao Mao is broke, he deliberately crashes into her car and then sells his bar to overcompensate her. Knowing how much the bar means to Guan Chun, Mao Mao later buys it back and the couple eventually get back together. In ‘The Worst Student’, Hui Zi tries her best to be close to the man she has loved for many years. Yet she is abandoned, three months pregnant, on the day of their marriage registration. Without regret or anger, Hui Zi decides to become an unmarried mother and gives birth to a son with the help of her friends. Just as Guan Chun’s patient waiting for Mao Mao pays off, Hui Zi’s courage and perseverance also helps her win the love of another man. One striking feature of I Belonged to You is that it portrays men and women as equally sincere and uncalculating in their relationships. Even in the face of betrayal, both male and female protagonists handle the situation with grace and consideration. Despite being greatly hurt by their partners’ infidelity, they neither seek revenge nor continue to stay in an unloving relationship. Ma Li divorces his wife because she has an extra-­marital affair. Although Ma Li, as the faithful spouse, could demand compensation according to Chinese marriage law, he leaves all the marital property to his wife so that she can live comfortably after the divorce. The same scene occurs in ‘The Legend of the Berserk Lolita’. He Muzi’s husband cheats on her four months after they get married. When they divorce, she does not take anything from her husband and even tells her mother-­ in-law not to blame her husband’s lover. This insistence on gender equality in relationships is also showcased in the book’s description of the ideal partner. Studies of media representations and

160   Ling Yang social attitudes have shown that the desirable subjects for love and marriage in Chinese society have been increasingly gendered, men defined by their material wealth and social status, while women have been defined by their appearance and character (Chen 2017; Chapter 2, this volume). By contrast, I Belonged to You offers an intriguing gender-­neutral and non-­materialistic alternative. On the front cover of the book, Zhang Jiajia’s most famous quote is reproduced: I hope there is a person like you. Like the cool breeze in the mountain, like the warm sunshine in the old town. From morning to evening, from mountain to study room. All is fine, as long as it is you in the end. (Zhang 2013) This poetic statement does not give any physical details of the ideal partner. Nor do the natural images evoked in the quote carry any clear gender implications in Chinese culture. Hence, we might infer that the ideal personhood described here applies to all gender and sexual orientations. Furthermore, the two similes that invoke nature in the quote—cool breeze and warm sunshine—are both incorporeal and subjective, as our perception of temperature varies from person to person. This emphasis on feelings and comfort in a relationship is radically different from explicit ideals such as ‘tall–rich–handsome’, an internet catchphrase that succinctly sums up the three external qualities many women are considered to be looking for in men. Male writers are generally more interested in writing about men’s sexual conquests than their romantic feelings. Yet I Belonged to You forcefully recasts men as subjects of feelings and foregrounds their capacity to love spontaneously, ingeniously and profoundly. In ‘Luo Tuo’s Girl’, Luo Tuo is in love with a girl who loves cooking but is a terrible chef. All her friends dread her monthly home banquet; only Luo Tuo is able to finish her food. The two get married and before long the girl dies of cancer. To cope with his unbearable grief, Luo Tuo begins to compile his dead wife’s cooking recipes from memory and reproduce the taste of her food. In ‘The Legend of the Berserk Lolita’, A Mei, a timid young man with a girlish nickname, has been in love with He Muzi for many years. Since childhood, it has always been He Muzi who protected him from being bullied by others. After getting divorced, He Muzi smashes A Mei’s room in a violent outburst of anger and anguish. A Mei is tormented by his inability to protect and comfort He Muzi. Instead of cleaning up the mess, he lives with it for two months, musing about it every day, so that he is able to empathize with her broken heart. He eventually musters up enough courage to confess his love to He Muzi. Scholars have studied an impressive spectrum of male identities in contemporary China. These include the elitist, sexist and nationalistic ‘new rich’ men in men’s lifestyle magazines (Song and Lee 2012); the cosmopolitan tall– rich–handsome in idol drama3 (Guo 2017); the tough, resourceful and patriotic war heroes in mainstream television series (Song 2016; Wen 2013); the good-­ looking, morally upright, Confucian-­type wen hero in online literature (Gong

Tiny Times, persistent love   161 and Yang 2017, pp. 76–79); the proliferation of new gender roles on the internet (Song and Hird 2014); and a variety of non-­normative masculinities staged on television (Wen 2013; Zhao 2015). We see men fight for their country, strive to achieve their life goals, pursue the women they want, bond with other men, enjoy their wealth and success and transgress traditional gender codes. Yet it is still rare to see men represented as a bundle of private sentiments, pining for their loved ones, agonizing over their loss and struggling to move on. Commenting on Kam Louie and Louise Edwards’ proposal of the wen/wu dichotomy of Chinese masculinity, Xuan Li and William Jankowiak (2016, p. 187) point out that both versions of Chinese maleness share ‘a reserved attitude toward the expression of emotions and an emphasis on self-­control’. The extravagant display of men’s emotion in I Belonged to You hence deviates markedly from the dominant contemporary model of Chinese masculinity. In fact, it harks back to a traditional type of masculinity, the ‘man of feeling’ (or qing-­crazy 情痴) that flourished with the cult of sentiment in late imperial China. Marked by ‘emotional sincerity, ebullience, and ecumenicalism’, the man of feeling ‘decrees that the only criterion for judging a man’s worth is his richness of emotion, not, as convention would have it, his rank, status, or wealth’ (Lee 2007, p. 40). This seems to be exactly Zhang Jiajia’s philosophy of life. He has confessed that he wants neither to be a public intellectual nor to devote himself to moneymaking, two life choices respectively associated with Han Han and Guo Jingming. As a lazy, sentimental foodie with an artistic bent, he merely wants to ‘be himself ’. He insists that the most beautiful thing in life for him is no more than having barbecue on a snow-­capped mountain peak (Ding 2013). Some critics have argued that the unconventional male characters in I Belonged to You are credible and appealing because they are all based on Zhang Jiajia’s own experiences (Ding 2013; Yan 2016). In a thinly-­veiled autobiographical story of a 32-year-­old divorced man named Chen Mo 陈末 (the homonym of both ‘sinking’, 沉没 and ‘silent’ 沉默 in Chinese), Zhang Jiajia sketches how he grieved after his marriage fell apart. He got drunk on vodka in the bar every day and gained 22 pounds in three months. Noticing that he still had some savings in his bank account, he decided to travel and accumulated 300 plane and train tickets within a year (Zhang 2013, p. 289). His hair also turned white because of the upheaval in his life (Yan 2016), bringing to mind the line in Su Shi’s (1037–1101) great ci poem, ‘Memories of the Past at Red Cliff ’: ‘My heart overflowing, surely a figure of fun. A man gray before his time’. Among the publicity materials provided by the publisher to e-­commerce websites, the ‘editor’s recommendation’ for I Belonged to You touts the book as an antithesis of Tiny Times: Before coming to our senses, [we] read Tiny Times. After affection is stirred, [we] read Zhang Jiajia, [who has written] the most resonating stories about emotion (qinggan gushi). If Guo Jingming’s Tiny Times depicts the love (aiqing) and life of the tall–rich–and–handsome and the white–rich–and– beautiful [upper class men and women], the stories in Zhang Jiajia’s I

162   Ling Yang Belonged to You recount the love and life of ordinary people, which is closer to you and me. (Amazon.cn 2018) While the recommendation recycles the common (mis)perceptions of Tiny Times, it also creates a myth of I Belonged to You as a collection of uplifting stories about ordinary folk who ‘continue to love persistently and keep hope alive despite all the pressure and helplessness in life’ (Shi 2015, p. 7). The book in fact offers neither an inclusive representation of the emotional life of the underprivileged nor an unequivocal eulogy of romantic love. Its repeated references to cars, real estate property, bars and holiday trips abroad hint at a typical middle-­class lifestyle (Guo 2015, p.  11). The quote about the ideal partner on the book cover discussed above also reveals a middle-­class identity, for not many Chinese families could afford a special room as a study in their apartments. Like the literati in imperial China who exalt obsession (pi) as a vehicle of self-­expression and ‘disdain competition for power and prestige as an inferior mode of life’ (Zeitlin 1993, p. 66), the excessive indulgence in emotion might also be a means for the better-­off, well-­educated urbanities to distance themselves from soulless materialism and defuse the pressure to succeed. Moreover, several pieces in the second half of I Belonged to You implicitly question the viability of romantic love as a ‘utopia of abundance, individualism and creative self-­fulfilment’ in contemporary China (Illouz 1997, p.  8). Zhang Jiajia’s story ‘I’m Liu Dahei’ skilfully juxtaposes the complications and tensions of a heterosexual marital relationship with the unconditional love of a human– dog relationship, insinuating that humans can establish a stronger bond with animals than with other humans. The short essay ‘To My Daughter Mercy, Happy Birthday’ further frames the human–canine bond as a pseudo father– daughter relationship. Finally, in the penultimate piece in the book, ‘There Is Only Best Love, No Great Love,’ Zhang (2013, pp.  283–286) openly declares that ‘there are only three great things in life: great landscapes, great food and great emotion’. By ‘great emotion’ he means familial love, rather than romantic love, because contemporary romantic love has come to involve too many conditions and calculations. While Guo Jingming’s fandom consists principally of girls in their teens to early twenties, Zhang Jiajia’s fans are drawn from a wider age range, including both young students and middle-­aged women. They interact with him on his Weibo, purchase his books and show up for his book signing events. In an attempt to promote Zhang Jiajia’s new book, one anonymous female fan even paid over RMB400,000 (approximately US$63,000) to display an advertisement on Huaihai Road, one of the two major shopping streets in Shanghai (Huang 2014). By projecting in his writings and public interviews the image of a talented, faithful, responsible and emotionally invested man, Zhang Jiajia has brought hope for a true and lasting love to many women in an era when marriage and relationships are proving to be increasingly unstable.

Tiny Times, persistent love   163

Conclusion It has been widely noted that the ‘post-­80s generation’ is the first generation to have grown up with the societal transformations brought about by China’s ‘reform and opening-­up’ policy. Their experiences epitomize the pressures and conflicts of living in post-­socialist China. The post-­1980s generation also has no first-­hand experience of the conventional socialist life course and has to completely ‘DIY’ its own biographies (Yan 2010). The post-­1980s writers have responded to their unique historical conditions by exploring and improvising in their writings, expressing new desires, subjectivities and life goals, both for their own generation and for the generations after them. Instead of clinging to the May Fourth ideology of ‘love is supreme’ (lian’ai zhishang), an ideology that enshrines heterosexual love as ‘the hypergood’ in life and the ultimate guarantee of personal happiness (Lee 2007, p.  145), both Tiny Times and I Belonged to You point to a wide range of alternative sources of happiness and meaning for contemporary youth, including familial love, same-­sex love, friendship, food and pets. Although the couple relationship is still the main source of intimacy for post-­socialist individuals (Sun and Lei 2017, p. 21), there are many other complementary or competing sources. The two texts also challenge dominant gender norms by expanding the roles available for men and women. Tiny Times subverts traditional femininity and creates the most independent and aggressive girl figure in contemporary Chinese literature. As an ‘articulation of force’ that can create change and keep ‘social flows alive’ (Lavin 2010, pp.  3–8), feminine aggression might be indispensable for young women’s self-­empowerment and push for gender equality, especially when it is balanced by an admirable devotion to female friendship. Similarly, I Belonged to You decouples masculinity from both nationalism and wage-­earning capacity and revises it as a capacity for intense emotion and sensitivity to others’ needs. This revision of the gender role is accompanied by an emphasis on soft factors in romantic relationships, such as feelings and personality, rather than hard factors like income and appearance. The enormous success of the book suggests that the educated middle class may be discontented with the widespread commodification of love and marriage in Chinese society and eager to look for more authentic interpersonal relationships. Admittedly, the two texts are also full of ambivalence and contradictions. The messy entanglement of individualism, consumerism and sisterhood in Tiny Times revives doubt about the accessibility of a genuine feminist subject position in contemporary China, as the ‘historical and political space’ such a position could inhabit has been erased (Thornham and Feng 2010, p. 208, emphasis in the original). The critique of rampant materialism in I Belonged to You is subtly undermined by its concurrent justification of a hedonistic abandonment to epicurean delights and romantic scenery, as food and nature are all highly commodified in the modern world. Nonetheless, at a time when the possibility of larger structural changes is dim, piecemeal changes in the intimate sphere and individual self might be all that we are able to achieve. And a quiet gender revolution is probably no less consequential than a loud political revolution.

164   Ling Yang

Notes 1 I was once informed by a student, a fledgling young gay writer, that 90 per cent of young male writers in the print literary market are gay. An Dong Ni has left many clues in his books and social media accounts that he has a boyfriend. Speculations about Guo Jingming’s homosexuality had circulated on the internet for years and were finally ‘confirmed’ in an unfortunate way. On 21 August 2017, Li Feng, a youth literature writer who used to belong to Guo Jingming’s company, published a post on his Weibo accusing Guo Jingming of sexually harassing him during a book promotion trip in 2010. Guo Jingming immediately denied the charge and handed the case to his lawyer (Li 2017). The incident ignited a new round of Guo Jingming bashing on the internet and some commentaries were rather homophobic. 2 The Bund is a famous waterfront area in central Shanghai and is regarded as the symbol of the city. 3 Idol drama (ouxiang ju) is a television genre popular in Asian countries. Using charming young actors as its key selling point, the genre often concerns the romantic love between a young couple in a modern setting.

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10 The ‘social factory’ of China’s male ‘virtual lovers’ Chris K. K. Tan and Zhiwei Xu

It has become something of a platitude in social theory to assert that capitalist production has become increasingly immaterial in nature, symbolic in both composition and form, without any necessary extension into physical space. (Luvaas 2013, p. 138)

Introduction Classic Marxist theory locates the site of value-­production, value-­extraction and the exploitation of labour in the two physical sites of the factory and the office (Marx 1967). Since the late 1970s, however, China has witnessed tremendous social changes in the wake of radical economic restructuring (Rofel 2007; Yang 2010; Zhang and Ong 2008), including changes in the very nature of labour itself. In this chapter, we invoke the concept of the ‘social factory’ (Virno 2004) to discuss the emerging phenomenon of xuni lianren 虚拟恋人, where ‘virtual lovers’ commodify and sell their affects1 entirely on the internet. Since April 2014, Chinese internet users have been able to purchase ‘care and concern’ from shops on the massive online shopping platform Taobao 淘宝 and the major internet forum Baidu Tieba 百度贴吧 (Duan 2015). For a fee that ranges from RMB10 (less than US$2) for an hour-­long trial to RMB450 (US$65) for a whole month, customers can hire virtual lovers to talk to them while the lovers perform character roles that range from innocent girl-­next-door and abusive stepmother to xiao xianrou 小鲜肉 (‘cute young thing’) boys and tyrannical bosses. For instance, a client may get her lover to play the role of the caring next-­door-uncle who greets her in the morning, inquires whether she has eaten lunch, bids her goodnight before she sleeps and listens throughout the day to the woes she has endured at school. Virtual lovers can be either male or female. Generally aged under 25, they typically cater to customers of the opposite sex. Neither side of this care-­formoney transaction meets the other in person. Depending on the lover’s comfort level, s/he communicates with the customer via text and/or voice messages and, at most, video chats on WeChat, QQ and other cell phone instant messaging apps. In their ‘real’ lives, lovers work part-­time; they are either university

China’s male ‘virtual lovers’   169 s­ tudents or hold entry-­level white-­collar jobs. Having no base pay, virtual lovers earn an average of RMB1,000 (US$145) a month. This remuneration, an income too low for anyone to live on by itself, is derived entirely from selling their affects to their customers. Young women dominate the virtual lover business on both the buyers’ and sellers’ sides. From his experience working at virtual lover shops as an administrative clerk, Zhiwei Xu (co-­author of this chapter) estimates that, overall, female customers outnumber males by three to one. He also recorded the following field conversation with ‘Weirufei’, a virtual lover shop owner: Xu:  Do people order more from guys or from girls in Weirufei:  I feel that [female customers] who feel

your shop? empty inside far outnumber the guys, because we sell on Taobao. There are more girls who shop there, and girls require more emotional comforting than guys. Take my shop, for instance. Once, female customers outnumbered the guys ten to one. Now, I have three female workers for every male [worker]. Many shops that sold only to girls [have] closed down. Guys are just too difficult to recruit. Xu:  Why? Weirufei:  Guys are more fulfilled in real life, and female customers have more expectations. Male lovers must have a good voice, and they must know how to converse. You think this kind of guy can’t find girlfriends in real life? At another shop, the owner, ‘Weixixi’, had employed a total of 128 virtual lovers since she first opened her business. Reflecting the dominance of women in this line of work, there were 82 female and 46 male lovers. Of this pool of 128 lovers, 21 were 16–17 years old while 86 (or 67 per cent of the pool) were aged 18–24 at the time fieldwork was carried out (see ‘Methods’ below). The remaining lovers were older, with the eldest being aged 30. While we could not determine the sexual orientations of either the lovers or their clients, 67 of the 82 female lovers were willing to take on same-­sex clients, while only seven of the 46 male lovers indicated they would do so. These numbers suggest that young people dominate the virtual lover trade and that virtual lovers favour the expression of heterosexual desires and intimacy. The intersection of class, gender and rurality can be explored through the prism of popular culture and public discourses, as evidenced in Yang’s analysis (see Chapter 9). Our research further complicates the gender–class nexus by examining the service-­providing side of the virtual lover phenomenon, leaving the consumption side for discussion at a later date. We focus on male lovers for two reasons. First, we wish to break the long association of women with care-­ giving jobs (Hochschild 1983). Second, we are both male, so it was easier for us to talk to male lovers. We asked the following questions: What draws young men into the trade? What qualities do virtual lover companies seek in their workers? How do the lovers protect their privacy in respect of their clients? In

170   Chris K. K. Tan and Zhiwei Xu answering these questions, we argue that the lovers instantiate the ‘social factory’ (Virno 2004), proving that the production and extraction of value now occurs not only in the factory and the office, but anytime and anywhere. We make our argument as follows: first, we discuss the theoretical framework of this chapter, followed by a review of the relevant literature and discussion of the research methods we used. We then analyze our fieldwork data and sum up our conclusions.

Social factory Decentralization and casualization of work characterize the concept of the ‘social factory’ (Virno 2004) that critically frames this study. Autonomist Marxist thinkers have long argued that, since the 1960s, the increasing global circulation of capital has exacerbated labour inequality in industrialized countries (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004; Virno 2004). Consequently, the global demand for labour mobility and flexibility has also increased, which in turn has led to a greater occurrence of precarious work (Allison 2013; Liu 2018). The development of digital media has further contributed to the informalization of labour, catalyzing a shift towards immaterial affective labour (Lukács 2013, 2015). For instance, with its portability and potential for instant contact, the cell phone loosens the production and extraction of value from the fixed space–time coordinates of the factory and the office. Now that these processes can occur anytime and anywhere, society itself is becoming a factory. The subsuming of all activities under capitalist development erases critical differences among types of work and the distinction between productive and unproductive labour (Virno 2004). Liao (2016) argues that by understanding the refusal to work as the rejection of a life calibrated by capitalist production and exploitation, the fact that work has become more precarious can be viewed as oddly positive. Among the younger generations long influenced by both digital post-­modern popular culture and neoliberal-­inspired entrepreneurship, the theory of the social factory can be used to capture the ways in which technological changes empower ordinary people, enable different forms of labour other than full employment and offer alternatives to the Western capitalist mode of development. However, not everybody shares this optimism. The highs of neoliberalism are so spectacular that people labour hard to achieve its ideals, even if it means exhausting whatever means they have (including their affects) in situations where there are decreasing opportunities to do so. Nonetheless, these highs remain rarely actualized, and people may even be exploited along the way (as in the case of virtual lovers). To exhort precarious work, then, can be ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant 2011).

Virtuality Virtual loving presents new ways of engaging with technologies. Thus, this chapter adds to an already expansive body of literature that details ethnographic

China’s male ‘virtual lovers’   171 engagement with digital media. Anthropologists challenge claims that digital media and other new participatory technologies will liberate and engender novelty (Hindman 2009; Lovink 2008). The digital divide between online and offline worlds remains (Warschauer 2004), but some critics continue to resurrect outdated modernization theories to influence the agenda of development projects and marginalized groups (Ginsburg 2008). Despite these limits, digital media make possible new modes of communication and selfhood, enable reorganized social perceptions and forms of self-­awareness and permit people to establish collective interests, institutions and life projects (Malaby 2009; Senft 2008). Ethnographers are increasingly investigating the practices, subjects and communicative modes of groups that depend entirely on digital technologies for their existence (Boellstorff 2008; Senft 2008). The majority of this scholarship continues to sharply differentiate between offline and online contexts, and between the past and the present (Kelty 2008; Sreberny and Khiabany 2010). Digital media scholars are increasingly researching virtuality, which Nardi (2015, p. 16) defines as: ‘human activity mediated through multiple digital technologies, including Internet telephony and video, instant messaging, blogging, social media, games, online worlds, forums, chat channels, listservs, podcasts, logs, and databases. Multiple applications and devices form a complex ecology producing virtual experience.’ Hutchby (2001, p. 444), in turn, defines ‘affordance’ as a technology’s ‘functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object’. Affordances structure the ways users communicate (Geraci 2014). Research on virtuality includes its links with activism (Tufekci and Wilson 2012) and play (Bardzell and Odom 2008). Boellstorff (2008) examines virtuality in its own terms, with little reference to the real world, reflecting the view that digital technologies are not repurposed ‘old’ media but game-­changing objects to be apprehended in their own right (Humphreys 2007). Some people, for instance, have come to prefer aspects of virtual life over real life (Gray 2009; Nardi 2010). The nature of labour has also changed, with work decentralized and casualized to the extent that digital users provide free labour and data (Malaby 2012; Terranova 2000).

‘Emotion’ or ‘affect’? By posing as boyfriends to their clients, virtual lovers sell their ‘care and concern’ for money. In the existing literature, this work is understood as emotional/affective in nature. Hochschild (1983, p.  7) defines emotional labour as service with a smile: a type of labour that ‘requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’. Furthermore, it is: the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place. This kind of labour calls for a coordination of mind and feeling and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honour as deep and integral to our individuality. (Hochschild 1983, p. 7)

172   Chris K. K. Tan and Zhiwei Xu Scholars have used the idea of ‘emotional labour’ to study such women-­related care-­giving jobs as nurses, flight attendants and nannies (Hochschild 1983) as well as (less conventionally) fortune-­tellers (Korkman 2015) and professional dominatrices (Pinsky and Levey 2015). On the other hand, the concept of ‘affect’ has been used to frame a wide range of relational, situational and philosophical inquiries, including human relations with plants (Archambault 2016); empathy between hunters and the hunted (Bubandt and Willerslev 2015); and maid cafés2 (Galbraith 2013). Affective labour is a form of immaterial labour, which Hardt and Negri (2000, p.  290) define as ‘labour that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication’. In his critique of the Marxist labour theory of value, Negri (1999) connects affect to ‘the power to act’ and ‘value from below’. Affect precedes and exceeds the relations of capital. Later, Hardt and Negri (2004, p. 108) identify ‘affective labour’ as that which ‘produces or manipulates affects’. Lukács (2013, p. 48) adds that ‘affective labour integrates processes of capital accumulation with practices of self-­determination by further blurring the line between paid and unpaid work’. Nested in service and entertainment industries, the affective economy satisfies as much as it exploits. In Japanese ‘host clubs’ that charge exorbitant prices for emotional and sexualized services, for instance, the male ‘hosts’ self-­produce and profit from their work, while their female clients are sold the possibility of realizing themselves as human beings worthy of love and recognition (Takeyama 2016). Here, we use ‘affect’ to describe the labour of virtual lovers. The reason is more grammatical than conceptual. ‘Affect’ indexes relations between persons, rather than experiences undergone by individuals acting on their own. This inter-­ subjectivity is reflected in ‘affect’ as a transitive verb (as in ‘X affects Y’). Hence, affect highlights how people both conduct themselves and others by structuring (yet not completely determining) possible courses of action (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009; Terranova 2000). In contrast, the verbal form of ‘emotion’ is the intransitive ‘emote’ that applies only to the sentence’s subject(s). Rather than coining new terms—as Korkman (2015) does with ‘feeling labour’—to encompass both emotional and affective labour (and potentially causing confusion), we therefore adopt the tidier option of using ‘affect’.

Methods We conducted participant observation and interviews from December 2014 to March 2016 entirely on the internet through eight online stores that we found on Baidu Tieba. We conducted 20 interviews, 16 with virtual lovers and four with store owners. Reflecting the youthfulness of virtual lover businesses, all informants (including the shop owners themselves) were under 30 years of age at the time of the interviews. At the start of fieldwork, Tan was already teaching as a faculty member, while Xu was then a graduate student. Hence, it was the younger, more age-­appropriate Xu who first approached the store owners. He spent two to three months at each shop as a store administrator. At the very last

China’s male ‘virtual lovers’   173 store, ‘J Shop’, he worked as a xuni nanyou 虚拟男友 (‘online boyfriend’) from January to March 2016, while he studied in Leipzig, Germany as an exchange student. Throughout the entire fieldwork period, we communicated with the bosses, workers and clients only by text and voice messages sent over social media apps. We did not meet any of the informants in person. We did not even do live video-­chats, even though the apps we used had this function. Some informants gave us personal information and/or sent us photos of their own volition, but we did not ask for these details. The research raised three methodological issues. The first was that of obtaining informed consent. At the first two online shops Xu visited, he openly declared his identity as a graduate student in journalism. The owners immediately barred him from further conversations. One said, ‘You’re from the journalism school? You’re not a reporter, are you? We don’t take interviews. Thank you!’. Later, we found out that prior to our fieldwork, a reporter had gone undercover at another store, and had written a sensationalistic newspaper article that alleged virtual lovers illegally prostituted themselves by doing video-­chats in the nude. This report forced the closure of a large number of shops. Clearly, Xu could not hope to obtain usable data if he followed standard ethical research protocols and revealed his background from the beginning. So, we adopted the following strategy: at the remaining six fieldwork sites, Xu initially made observations while hiding his identity and purpose. When the research concluded at each site, Xu declared himself to his informants. By this time, he had earned sufficient trust and rapport that all of them agreed to let us interview them and use the data gathered. This trust and rapport increased the likelihood that our informants gave credible and authentic answers. The asynchronicity of data collection raised a second methodological issue. Like emails, interviewing by text and voice messages presented discontinuities that might cause informants to forget what they had said previously (Russell and Bullock 1999). However, we found that this asynchronicity allowed informants more time than would be possible in traditional face-­to-face interviews to carefully ponder our questions before answering. This time to consider gave informants greater ownership of their narratives by allowing them to alter the shape and structure of their answers to fit more closely with their constructions of reality. That they could do so in a time and space convenient to them arguably led to richer stories. The final methodological issue we encountered was that the flow of the conversation could lead informants to overlook certain questions or to answer them only briefly. The time gap in text and voice messaging thus enabled us to look back at the replies already given to check if all our questions had been answered sufficiently well (James and Busher 2006). Thus, while asynchronous interviewing has its drawbacks, we argue it produced data that was just as credible and authentic as that derived from more traditional face-­to-face interviews.

174   Chris K. K. Tan and Zhiwei Xu

Analysis How virtual lovers operate Having discussed the relevant literature, we now move to detail the affective labour of virtual lovers. By ‘affective labour’, we refer to that form of immaterial labour that ‘produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, p.  290). We start by examining the virtual lover shop and the services it provides. Such a shop advertises its services either on the massive online shopping platform Taobao or (more commonly) the major internet forum Baidu Tieba. Prospective employees indicate their interests in the discussion threads started by the shop(s) they want to work at, leaving details such as as their internet nickname, their personality type, any special skills they may possess, their ethnic group and the kinds of services they are able to provide (e.g. voice messages, video-­chats, having same-­sex clients). To kick-­start their businesses, new shop owners often ask friends and classmates from their hometown to work for them. As such, virtual loving extends China’s rapidly growing e-­commerce economy that in 2010 garnered transactions worth RMB4.5 trillion (about US$652 billion) and employed 1.6 million Chinese young people between 20 and 32 years of age (China Daily 2011; Global Times 2011). Many shops list the qualities they seek in potential employees. These qualities include having sufficient spare time (college students and white-­collar workers are the best); good conversational skills (e.g. high emotional quotients, patience, a good temper, knows how to find new conversation topics, knows how to role play in text messages); professionalism (i.e. employees will not quit during the contracted time with their clients); and having had some romantic experiences. Some shops first charge prospective employees a fee to train them; ‘Weixixi’ charges RMB10 for registration and training. Others interview job-­seekers first before giving them the required training. The interview itself does not seem too difficult. When Xu, the second author of this chapter, was interviewed at ‘J Shop’, the owner questioned him with four other applicants together in an online chat group. The first job-­seeker introduced himself briefly. He said that he had previously worked at another online shop for three months, but that shop had since closed down. He uploaded two selfies, sang a few lines from a pop song and then revealed his age (21 years old), special skills (singing, photography, can-­do video-­chats), personality (humorous) and preferred clients (both sexes). He passed the interview in less than five minutes. Selected employees later submitted copies of their real identity cards for verification.3 Before a virtual lover starts work, he must first be trained. A trainer at ‘Weirufei’s’ shop said: We have basic training before you start work. [We teach you] what you can and cannot say. We must be customer-­oriented. To maintain a good experience, a lover cannot have too many clients simultaneously. When the client

China’s male ‘virtual lovers’   175 has nothing to say, we must find new topics. We must have a good attitude, a good grasp of the role we’re playing, and reply quickly enough. When I first start chatting, I will address my client as qin’ai de 亲爱的 or something more vulgar like baobei 宝贝 or bao’er 宝儿 [all three terms translate as ‘dear’ in English, but they index different degrees of intimacy]. It sounds low class, but the customers like it this way. The trainer proceeded to teach Xu how to address customers in a role-­appropriate manner. A lover who role plays a tyrannical boss may announce his presence with a demanding ‘Hey! Open the door!’. As a warm-­hearted next-­door uncle, he may switch to a kinder-­sounding ‘Girl, Uncle is here’. This switching of roles between clients exemplifies Goffman’s (1959) theory of self-­presentation, which states that we want to positively influence how others perceive us. Goffman likens this desire to impress to the theatre, where an individual performs her public identity on the ‘front stage’ to her audience, while her real self remains ‘backstage’. However, virtual loving is emotionally exhausting work. As much as a lover may want to play his role well, his real self will seep into his ‘front stage’ performance little by little. In fact, the trainer at ‘Weirufei’ confessed: Most of the time, we’re ourselves; we’re not acting. If you know what to say to make your customers happy, why don’t you say it? They spend money (on us) to relieve stress, and some phrases are tried and tested, so why not use these lines? Virtual lover ‘Monster’, however, maintained that lovers should also be flexible in their conversational styles, as the over-­standardization of phrases might make the lover sound rigid and fake and actually lower the quality of the overall experience. In fact, to maintain the illusion of authenticity in the role play, lovers are advised not to chat with more than one client at any one time. As ‘Monster’ stressed, ‘You must be devoted (zhuanyi 专一), even though the love is short-­ lived.’ As well as maintaining the front stage/back stage distinction, virtual lovers demonstrate Virno’s (2004) idea of the social factory. To succeed in playing a role, a lover necessarily draws on his own store of personal experiences of what he thinks each role should be like. This capitalization on one’s own knowledge and memories reflects the imperative to maximize human capital for material gain that rests at the core of neoliberalism. Indeed, the constant changes in the roles that a lover plays instantiate the flexible labour demanded by neoliberalism. This flexibility resonates with the idea of the social factory. As an extension of the Fordist system of production, the social factory remains contingent on women’s unwaged reproductive and affective work that regenerates and maintains the male-­dominated paid workforce. Female Japanese net idols,4 for instance, are expected to labour at being cute to soothe the angst of their occupationally precarious male fans, but most of this affective work does not result in any significant monetary remuneration (Lukács 2015).

176   Chris K. K. Tan and Zhiwei Xu Emotional satisfaction The lack of economic compensation for virtual lovers compared to more regular jobs does not, however, mean that virtual loving lacks emotional satisfaction. Virtual lovers join the trade partly because they perceive their labour as innocuous play as much as it is work. Unlike Japanese net idols, virtual lovers do not see their affective labour as a stepping stone to more lucrative work. A 16-year-­old shop-­owner, ‘Ming Mamasang’, who advertises her shop’s services on Baidu Tieba, remarked: Here at Tieba, we don’t usually charge money. Why charge? The customer just needs to build 20 storeys. We do this [virtual loving] mainly for fun.… If we get an annoying customer, we just delete him from our [online chat] friends list. We don’t have to tolerate him. Baidu Tieba is a website popular among teenagers. Unsurprisingly, young people make up the vast majority of customers on the site. The shop owners are aware that teenagers have low disposable incomes, so they do not ask clients to pay in cash. Instead, clients need to gailou 盖楼 (‘build storeys’) by leaving positive appraisals in the thread of tieba posts started by the shop they patronize. In Chinese internet-­speak, lou 楼 (‘building’) refers to a thread of posts, so the person who starts the thread is the louzhu 楼主 (‘building-­owner’). Those who respond to the thread build upon the louzhu’s initial post, adding storeys to the metaphorical building (hence gailou) not upwards, but downwards.5 Following this vertical architectural logic, responders refer to each other as loushang 楼上 (‘upstairs’, someone who responded earlier) and louxia 楼下 (‘downstairs’, someone who responds later). The longer/taller a thread/building grows, the higher a popularity ranking it attains in Baidu Tieba, and the easier it becomes for the shop to pop up in a search by other forum users. The ludic element in virtual loving reduces the sense of alienation our informants may feel from their labour. Unlike one of Lukács’s (2015, p. 501) informants, none of them want to ‘pull out [their] hair … carve out [their] pores … tear up [their] blood vessels … gorge [themselves] with lipsticks’ because of their work. If virtual loving ever leaves lovers tired or disgusted, they can always just quit their jobs. Similar to computer gamers who provide free labour and data (Malaby 2012), this playfulness also obfuscates the fact that the labour here is decentralized, casualized, very cheap and (most crucially) easily exploited (Terranova 2000), as we discuss further below. Besides play, what else motivates people to become virtual lovers? We postulate two possible reasons for the trade’s emergence. First, as their economy continues to neoliberalize (Rofel 2007; Yang 2010; Zhang and Ong 2008), the Chinese have become increasingly cognizant of the state’s retreat from society. In the urgent search for individual economic livelihoods, anything not explicitly illegal is, by default, permissible (even if this legality can often be quite grey in reality). We argue that virtual loving stems from this pushing of the boundaries

China’s male ‘virtual lovers’   177 between legal and illegal work. Indeed, its location at the frontiers of permissibility explains why lovers are explicitly forbidden from doing naked chats or anything that might attract legal charges of prostitution. Second, we maintain that the friendships enabled by virtual loving benefit both the lovers and their clients. Both lovers and clients can use the technologically empowered market as a safe and inexpensive means to hone their communication skills, and explore what love means to them. School life before college, as Fong (2004) highlights, is dominated by a singular focus on scoring as high as possible in the all-­important university entrance examinations (gaokao 高考). Students know that as soon as they graduate from university, their parents and relatives will start urging them to marry (cuihun 催婚). The weight of the ‘sin’ of singlehood falls particularly heavily on women (Fincher 2014). Hence, college presents a relatively relaxed four years during which undergraduates can practise their dating techniques and explore the meaning of love away from the pressure cookers of the gaokao, on the one hand, and their marriage-­eager parents, on the other. In theory, virtual loving is a care-­for-money transaction, so lovers are supposed to stop contacting their clients once the service period expires. In reality, not everyone does that, because both lover and client can derive emotional satisfaction from their relationship. One lover, ‘Lanyun’, revealed that a female client booked him for the month. Over the 15 days they had been chatting, he grew accustomed to her. Consequently, he said he would keep her in his friends list even after the service period expired. They became real friends while chatting because, like him, she was also a 23-year-­old student applying for graduate studies. Virtual loving also allows consumers to experience the fantasy of the perfect partner. Precisely because customers can specify what character traits they desire in their lovers, they receive, in effect, a perfect boyfriend. This ideal partner is, of course, a fantasy. Although all social existence entails loss, we fantasize to compensate for much that is lacking in our real lives. While reality can only remain fragmented and partial, we imagine fantasies as complete ‘scenarios’ or ‘tableaux’ (Silverman 1992). Consequently, a virtual lover is ‘more real than real’ (or ‘hyper-­real’ in Baudrillard’s [1994] sense), simply because an actual boyfriend will rarely, if ever, be as caring as a hired one. While we did not focus on the clients in our research, one male customer, ‘Zakin’, expressed his satisfaction with a virtual romance that, for him, was equivalent to ‘real’ romance. When we talked to him, Zakin was studying at a well-­known university, but avoiding classes. He explained: I’m quite introverted. I don’t usually talk to girls. I love this virtual lover thing, because it lets me experience something that I never did before in real life. It’s worth it that I can talk so freely to a girl. I don’t know if there’s a set standard to this thing called love, and I never dated anyone before. Virtual loving made me very happy, so I take it that I’ve now actually dated.

178   Chris K. K. Tan and Zhiwei Xu Zakin loves surfing Japanese anime websites, including China’s highly popular video-­sharing site Bilibili. To get free Bilibili membership, he once spent an entire afternoon answering 100 anime-­related trivia questions. Avoiding classes as much as he could, he spends most of his days online instead, and barely speaks face-­to-face even to his dormitory room-­mates. By his own description, Zakin appears to fit the stereotype of the zhainan 宅男 (from the original Japanese otaku オタク), that is, someone (popularly imagined as a nerdy, socially inept male) who possesses an extreme interest in a particular genre (usually anime, manga or video games) or object (Kam 2013). Zakin chose a ‘cute’ type virtual lover called ‘JJ’. Their chats started in a routine manner, but as time passed, they started talking about their frustrations in life. Zakin said ‘JJ’ was just what his ideal girlfriend should be: independent but caring. He wrote her a love poem, for which she thanked him. He replied: I wrote it thinking that you really are my girlfriend. For a moment there, I thought it was for real.… At first I thought that virtual loving is fake love, but things are never absolute. People have met their online dates in offline situations before, no? I don’t know how long we can be together, so I treat each day as the last. Zakin never met ‘JJ’ in real life; she deleted him once his time with her had expired. What matters more is that she enabled him to imagine what love could, ideally, be like and allowed him to practise dating skills that he would need in the future with a real girlfriend. Exploitation As much as it provides emotional satisfaction, the affective economy is also exploitative (Takeyama 2016). According to shop owner Weixixi: We charge about 20 RMB per day for our services. We start charging as soon as you add a lover into your [chatting app’s] friends list. An hour-­long trial (tiyan 体验) is 10 RMB, and we charge higher for other services, such as singing, communication by voice messages only, sending [a lover’s] personal photos and video-­chats. We also have ‘Gold Star Boyfriend’ (jinpai nanyou 金牌男友) services for 40 to 45 RMB (US$6) a day, or 20 RMB for a tiyan. We pay our employees once every ten sessions. We also pay them if they leave before they finish ten sessions. The shop takes a 30 per cent cut. Other shops split it 50–50, but I feel that the employees should get more because they work so hard. The 50 per cent cut from a lover’s fees highlights the exploitative nature of virtual loving. In January 2015, the shop ‘Chunmeng Xiaodian 蠢萌小店’ sold services worth RMB28,050 (US$4,100). The owner took a 40 per cent cut, earning him/her RMB11,200 (US$1,600) that month (Duan 2015). By comparison,

China’s male ‘virtual lovers’   179 the RMB1,000 (US$145) that a lover earns per month seems very little. Yet, considering that lovers are usually college students who pay as little as RMB10 per meal in their college canteen, even this small income sufficiently covers a lover’s regular monthly expenses. On top of the exploitation, caring for another person is emotionally taxing, and this weariness drives many lovers to quit. Lanyun explained: There’s a high turnover rate, because this job is tiring. Some shops have strategists who formulate standardized answers for the lovers to use. I don’t agree with this method. Standardized answers aren’t as good as those from the heart (zouxin 走心), but zouxin tires lovers out very easily, so emotional weariness becomes our occupational hazard. It’s like that power gauge in your computer game. After you use your power, it takes time to recover. To help delay emotional exhaustion, virtual lover shops forbid clients from hiring the same lover for more than three months at a time. Clients also cannot hire the same lover consecutively. Privacy Virtual lover shops also have a series of measures that help lovers to protect their privacy and prevent their clients from becoming too intimate. Privacy is contextual (Altman 1977). Livingstone (2006) conceptualizes it as a process of regulating who knows what about you, rather than the disclosure of certain types of information. Shops have in-­house manuals that teach privacy-­protecting measures. Lovers can disallow video-­chats and refuse to tell clients their personal cell phone numbers. Some manuals suggest that lovers set up accounts specifically for the virtual loving work, so that clients are kept separate from their real friends. Others also state explicitly that lovers should stick to only ‘healthy’ non­sexual conversation topics. Some young female clients allegedly ask their lovers to show their penises during video-­chats, so this insistence on non-­sexual topics not only protects the lovers, but also shields the shop itself from legal charges of abetting prostitution. When he received requests for personal photos that he did not want to give, virtual lover ‘Albers’ said he would deflect the request in a humorous manner: ‘What’s there to see? We’re such an old couple (laofu laoqi 老夫老妻) already’. Alternatively, he countered with questions of his own: ‘Aiyah! Have you forgotten what I look like? You hurt me so much.’ Another lover, ‘Xiaoyezi’, admitted that he supplied one fake answer for every three real ones. This way, he could get into character more easily, while protecting his privacy and maintaining the façade of authenticity in the encounter. Being too protective of one’s privacy, however, can harm business. ‘Weixixi’, for instance, had one of her female customers complain: Hey boss, [is your employee] trying to hoodwink me? ‘She’ has a picture of a girl [as ‘her’ account’s main photo] now. It was a guy just a few days ago,

180   Chris K. K. Tan and Zhiwei Xu but the gender has now changed. Worse, he (she?) is as chatty as a dead pig. I’m so frustrated. I wanted to see his real photos, but he wouldn’t send them. I asked him how old he was, but he refused to tell me. All he ever said was ‘Baobei [‘dearest’], be good’. In the end, he still had the cheek to ask me for a good appraisal. With his service, I could only roll my eyes. As a result of her lover’s secrecy, the client above felt that she had wasted her time and money, as she could not even determine whether her lover was really a man. Reciprocated self-­disclosure, as psychologists Tolstedt and Stokes (1984) cogently argue, constitutes a crucial element in the construction of intimacy. Without it, one can achieve neither the range of discussion nor the depth of knowledge upon which one builds intimacy and trust with another person.

Conclusion Before China’s economic liberalization in 1979, labour was channelled towards rapid industrialization to attempt to materially prove the ideological superiority of communism over capitalism. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), in particular, affective expressions had to service this ultimate goal or risk being violently shut down as ‘counter-­revolutionary’ and ‘bourgeois’ (Honig 2003; Zhang 2007). However, Yan (2009) claims that over the past three decades, hyper-­accelerated economic growth has not only eroded genuine love and care, but also enabled the emergence of radical consumption-­based subjectivities to fill this affective lacuna. Against this larger backdrop of a new ‘desiring China’ (Rofel 2007), the nature of labour has also changed. Since the first half of 2014, young Chinese consumers have been able to purchase ‘care and concern’ from equally young virtual lovers. For a fee as low as RMB10 for the first hour, customers can hire these lovers to talk to them in specified character roles. Doing so enables customers to hone their dating skills before their parents begin, in earnest, to urge them to marry as soon as possible after university graduation. Like other cases elsewhere (Lukács 2015; Malaby 2012; Pun and Koo 2015), virtual loving economically exploits the lovers’ affective labour, as shop owners take as much as a 50 per cent cut from the lovers’ earnings. However, a lover can still cover most of his monthly expenses with this income. The practice of getting customers to post positive online reviews in lieu of payment further suggests a focus on innocuous play in the business. The fact that virtual loving exists as a legitimate business indicates that affective labour has shed enough of its stigma for young people to willingly use it to earn money. Virtual loving challenges the materialism inherent in the Marxist labour theory of value. Having incorporated both affective labour and the cell phone’s technology of mobile communication, it loosens value extraction from the traditional sites of the factory and the office. Since extraction can now occur anytime and anywhere, virtual loving exemplifies the socialization of the factory that Virno (2004) predicted. As tempting as it is to treat this dematerialization of labour in a typical Marxian teleology as symptomatic of the latest stage of

China’s male ‘virtual lovers’   181 c­ apitalistic development, we heed Kipnis’s (2007) warning and resist doing so. In other words, we do not suggest that virtual loving constitutes anything more than a form of labour in contemporary China. Currently, we cannot predict whether virtual loving will wither away, mutate into something else or remain in its present form. The most likely outcome is that, now that it has been proved that one can make money from selling purely affective labour, other similar labour forms will emerge in the future.

Notes 1 The emotion/affect split originates from psychoanalysts who distinguish first-­person representations of feeling from third-­person ones, where ‘emotion’ designates feelings that ‘belong’ to the speaker, ‘I’, while ‘affect’ indexes feelings that observers describe (Ngai 2005, p. 25). Grossberg (1992) and Massumi (2002) argue for a clearer distinction between affect and emotion in terms of a subjective/objective divide and narrative/ non-­narrative opposition; however, Sianne Ngai (2005) regards differences between emotion and affect as a matter of degree. 2 Maid cafes are cafes where waitresses dress up as French maids and address customers as ‘Masters’ and ‘Mistresses’. They originate from Akihabara in Tokyo. 3 Besides virtual lovers and administrative clerks, a shop also employs ‘emotion consultants’ (qinggan zixunshi 情感咨询师) or strategists (chumouhuace shi 出谋划策师). The main job of both positions is to formulate suitable phrases for different scenarios that lovers may encounter with their clients, including how to politely deflect questions that lovers deem too intrusive. Both the consultant and strategist roles are also part-­ time jobs, and they each pay around RMB800 per month. 4 ‘Net idols’ are people who attempt to earn money by live-­streaming. The contents of the performance may be singing, playing musical instruments or just simply chatting with the audience. A popular net idol can then persuade people to buy products that she has produced, e.g. CDs that she has recorded, T-­shirts or mugs with her face printed on them or even her used clothing. If she gets really famous, a net idol can make the leap into mainstream pop culture. 5 The first person to respond is the lou’s first guest. The bedroom goes to the louzhu, so this first guest sleeps on the shafa 沙发 (‘sofa’) and he is referred to as such. Subsequent responders are also referred to humorously in terms of furniture and other parts of a building’s structure. The second responder is called bandeng 板凳 (‘bench’, as the sofa is already taken); the third diban 地板 (‘floor’, as there are no seats left); the fourth dixiashi 地下室 (‘basement’, because the floor is gone); and the fifth xiashuidao 下水道 (‘sewage pipes’, because everything else is taken).

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11 International romance Changing discourses of Chinese– foreign intimacy in the decades of economic reforms Pan Wang Introduction Prior to China’s (re)opening to the foreign market in 1979, the topic of international love and romance was absent from Chinese public discourse. This was in large part due to the ‘anti-­capitalist’ ideology imposed by the communist party. In the 1980s this vacuum was filled by the public’s imaginings about and fear of foreign romance. From the mid-­1980s to the 1990s, the significant number of Chinese women (but not Chinese men) who entered an international marriage raised public concerns about Chinese women’s motivation in marrying foreigners. This is evidenced by the gendered and cautionary tales of tragic overseas marriages propagated by the state-­run media as part of a national campaign against negative Western influence. The 2000s marked a stage of heightened attention given to international love and romance, juxtaposed with associated problems in the public discourse. These narratives simultaneously celebrated China’s newly gained cosmopolitanism and generated new topics for public discussion and debate around Chinese–foreign intimacy. While the dichotomous construction continued in the 2010s, Beijing launched a ‘dangerous love’ campaign, targeting foreign espionage disguised as romance-­seeking foreigners in China. This further politicized and complicated discourses of international intimacy in China, leaving it to the public to re-­assess and re-­imagine romance and love between Chinese nationals and foreigners. Class and gender not only intersect with rurality; they also, as this chapter demonstrates, have a distinct racial dimension. This chapter presents a genealogy of the narratives of international romance and love in China that have developed from the late 1970s to the present. The narratives include personal memoirs, government documents and posters and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) media’s coverage of Chinese–foreign intimacy, including newspapers, television documentaries, talk shows and online discourses. I borrow the concept of Occidentalism to explore the identity politics of these narratives and the ways in which they work to shape the public understanding of foreign and Chinese partners, international love and romance and the different social and cultural implications of these narrative constructions in the PRC. The discussion has three aims. First, it highlights the salient issues of gender, race and class

186   Pan Wang which make cross-­cultural intimacy different from the ‘mainstream’ romance culture in China. Discourses of romance have drawn on these differences either as catalysts to cement love or as problems that create conflicts between individuals, families and countries. Second, the discussion reveals tensions and complexities in cross-­cultural encounters in Chinese–foreign intimacy. I link these tensions to historical legacies of Sinicism, such as national pride or ethnocentrism arising from the Chinese people’s new-­found capacity to appreciate foreign cultures and their desire to be liked by foreigners. I note also the correlation between the official construction of the ‘foreigner’ and foreign romance and the construction of these themes in popular culture. Third, the discussion shows the Chinese people’s changing perceptions of themselves in relation to the foreign ‘other’. I argue that obedience to the dictate to exclude ‘foreignness’ and maintain pure ‘Chineseness’ before 1979 gave way from the 1980s to the 2000s to an eagerness to acquire a cosmopolitan Chinese identity by embracing or engaging with foreign cultures. This, in turn, became an acceptance of a revived official reinforcement of the dichotomy between ‘Chinese’ and ‘foreigner’ in the 2010s. Overall, the chapter argues that these historical shifts in representations of Chinese–foreign intimacy, together with issues of culture, gender, race, class and identity, are simultaneously enabled and limited by the Chinese government.

Late 1970s to mid-­1980s: ‘a good girl will not date or marry a foreigner’ My mother once told me a story about a colleague of hers, a handsome Amer­ ican man in China, who during the late 1970s fell in love with my mother at work and wanted to marry her. However, when my mother mentioned him to her mother, my grandmother told her that ‘a good girl will not date or marry a foreigner’. Another story, according to retrospective reports, narrates the hardship experienced by a couple in 1981. A 24-year-­old Chinese girl named Li Shuang was detained by the local police and denounced for ‘offending national decency’ (yousun guojia zunyan) after she was found co-­habiting with her fiancé Emmanuel Bellefroid, a diplomat, in the French diplomatic compound. Li was sentenced to two years of ‘re-­education through labour’ and Bellefroid was accused of supporting anti-­government activities. Li was not released until July 1983, when the French government interceded in this matter. Li then travelled to Paris where the couple married and had two sons (Earnshaw 1981). In a similar vein, reports show that in 1984 the Chinese actress Shen Danping fell in love with a German man, Uwe Kraeuter, an anti-­Vietnam war activist working as an editor at the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. Their courtship was conducted ‘underground’ for fear of negative reactions by the public and members of Shen’s work unit and family. Shen’s parents allegedly felt shamed by her desire to marry a ‘foreigner’ (‘Huangruo geshi de mingxing gushi’ 2008) and feared that by marrying him she might be trafficked overseas. They even

International romance   187 refused to attend Shen’s wedding ceremony (Chen 1993, pp. 38–39; ‘Huangruo geshi de mingxing gushi’ 2008). Moreover, Shen’s work unit initially refused to issue documents in support of her marriage registration. Despite these obstacles, the couple married and had two daughters (‘German Jumps Cultural Wall’ 2004; Fang 2008; Lü 2005). Such examples indicate that at the beginning of China’s transition from a planned to a market economy during the late 1970s, Maoist ideology continued to dominate the mindset of that era’s generation. They remained committed to Mao’s legacy and attempted to pass it on to the next generation. To conform to the hegemonic communist values of that time, this ‘leftist’ mentality de-­ sexualized heterosexual love, politicized romance and nationalized intimacy by upholding the anti-­capitalist banner. The resilience of such a mentality can be attributed to a lack of knowledge and limited media coverage of foreigners, foreign culture and Chinese–foreign intimacy. Coverage of romantic love and bourgeois lifestyle-­related content were banned in the communist media culture created by Mao (Hu et al. 2015, p. 171). Reports of romance always presented it as a site of class struggle linked to ‘revolutionary comradely (tongzhi) friendship, whilst showing a profound disapproval of signs of “capitalist lust” ’ (Zhang 2014, p. 184). The dominant discourses were homogenously against foreigners, foreign cultures and overseas relations. This position was only modified by the second-­generation Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who in October 1977 said that ‘overseas relations are a good thing’. In early reports by the People’s Daily, an official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, foreigners, especially white men, were stereotyped as ‘overly indulgent in lust’ (zongyu guodu) and having ‘abnormal sexual desire’ (biantai xingyu) (Xinhua News Agency 1958, cited in Zhang 2015, p. 96). Such sexualized constructions served to redefine China’s national identity and enacted a ‘political allegiance’ among citizens at a time when China urgently needed to rebuild national confidence and distance itself from the ‘decadent’ capitalist West (Zhang 2015, p. 96). Such concepts proved to be resilient and were tied to the notion of class conflicts around gender relations during Mao’s era. It was a time when the ‘new model woman’, propagandized by the party as representative of the working class, was encouraged to draw a clear line between herself and ‘materialist’ bourgeois women (Zhang 2015, p. 92). This idea implied that Chinese women who attempted to form intimate relationships with foreign men would not only be lowering themselves to become members of the ‘backward’ capitalist class (whose members were perceived to be exploiting the working class) but would also become enslaved by foreign men. Unsurprisingly, although Mao’s era had passed, when responding to the younger generation’s courtship and marriage with foreigners, the older generation still imagined foreign people as rich, dangerous, evil and associated with human trafficking. Young Chinese women who dated foreigners were accused of being undisciplined and hence ‘not good girls’. The ideological basis of such a response was rooted in the desire to discipline individual citizens as a way to suppress domestic political opponents of the communist hegemony (Chen 1992, p. 688).

188   Pan Wang The dualistic view of foreigners and Chinese people, together with ignorant notions of Chinese–foreign romance, was thus a by-­product of the Maoist ‘Occidentalism’ that aimed to strengthen Chinese nationalism. In other words, it was not a straightforward reversal of Western Orientalism, which would see China seeking world dominance (Chen 1992, p. 688). However, I argue that in relation to international romance, Occidentalism functioned, in the early post-­Mao era, to maintain the homogenous communist discourse and fostered nostalgia for the earlier socialist purity in order to protect Chinese people from the potential harm that might be caused by the transition to a market economy. This is evidenced by the official policy that required overseas Chinese, Hong Kong and Macau compatriots to provide a work certificate or proof of reliable income when registering a marriage with a mainland Chinese citizen. Such criteria were employed to ‘protect mainland Chinese citizens from fraudulent marriages (shou qipian), and to ensure that their intended spouse was capable of supporting them financially once they relocated to regions other than mainland China’ (MCA 1983a). Under communist ideology, Chinese–foreign intimacy involving a government official had always been entangled with political sensitivities and during the early post-­Mao period was subject to public scrutiny. According to the Provisions for the Registration of Marriage between Chinese Citizens and Foreigners (Zhongguo gongmin tong waiguoren banli jiehun dengji de jixiang guiding), in 1983 foreign nationals were precluded from marrying Chinese citizens who were members of the army on active service (xianyi junren), diplomatic personnel (waijiao renyuan), public security personnel (gong’an renyuan), state personnel in charge of confidential work (jiyao renyuan) or ‘state secrets’ (zhangwo zhongda jimi de renyuan) and persons serving a criminal sentence (fuxing) or receiving re-­education through labour (zhengzai jieshou laodong jiaoyang) (Article 4, MCA 1983b). These restrictions were justified on the grounds of China’s national security and reputation. The rules show that during this time international love was not only a personal but also a national issue. Underlying these phenomena was a residual ideological clash between a newly established and developing Chinese regime eager to justify and defend its socialist identity and legitimacy and an affluent West, historically entrenched in capitalism.

Late 1980s to mid-­1990s: ‘first-­class Chinese women marrying overseas’ The deepening of China’s economic reform and the policy to open China up from the late 1980s to the 1990s triggered a wave of Westernization. Increasing numbers of cultural products and services featured romances and lifestyles imported from overseas. These became popular, especially among the Chinese liberal and elite classes (Zhang 2015, p. 97). They included romantic movies and love songs, branded clothing and cosmetics, as well as sexual commodities and services. These products broadened the horizons of local Chinese and gradually awakened in many the desire to embrace and pursue the modern and ‘higher’

International romance   189 quality of life typified by the developed West of North America and Western Europe. Unsurprisingly, this nurtured a ubiquitous sense of admiration and affection for Western culture, which subsequently turned into ‘Western fever’ and even ‘Western worshipping’ (Zhang 2015, p. 97). A very popular saying among the Chinese during this time stated: First-­class women go overseas [to marry in the ‘Global North’]; second-­ class women live in Shenzhen and Zhuhai provinces [locations popular with wealthy businessmen who reaped enormous benefits from the economic reform]; third-­class women live in Shanghai [a well-­off city]; and fourth-­ class women breast-­feed at home [staying where they are, committed to household chores]. [Yideng nüren piaoyang guohai, er’deng nüren Shenzhen Zhuhai, sandeng nüren zhongguo Shanghai, siding nüren zaijia weinai.] Although this sexist statement exists in various versions, overall it points to the fact that a Chinese woman’s social status/class was tied to her marriage, i.e. to the class of the man she married. It is also self-­Orientalist as it categorizes women who marry in Western countries as first-­class, suggesting that marrying a foreigner or a Chinese man overseas and living outside China was better than marrying in China. The Chinese ‘mania’ for the West further evolved into Chinese self-­criticism, culminating in the six-­part documentary He Shang (River Elegy), broadcast on 11 June 1988. He Shang compared and contrasted an advanced ‘blue sea’ civilization of the West with a stagnated ‘Yellow River’ Chinese culture. It painted the West in favourable colours and denigrated the meaning of China’s national cultural symbols such as the Great Wall (portrayed as a source of trauma and confinement rather than protection), the Yellow River (a source of poverty and violence rather than a symbol of grandeur and national resistance) and the ‘Yellow Earth’ (a source of parochialism and conservatism rather than liberalism) (Chen 1992, pp.  693–694). As a product of ‘anti-­official Occidentalism’, these narratives reinforced ‘Western fever’, reinvigorated China’s imagination of foreign cultures and peoples and cultivated a sense of Western superiority and Chinese inferiority. After its debut, the show even triggered a ‘He Shang’ phenomenon, in which intellectuals began to use the media as a platform to conduct conversations with a national audience about China’s history, current status quo and future (Chen 1992, p.  702). However, the show touched the nerves of China’s ruling class, the nationalists and cultural conservatives, who condemned it as ‘vilifying China’ and hence saw it as a counter-­discourse against the government. They demanded stronger media censorship and the series was removed. China’s embrace of Western culture, together with the emergence of self-­ criticism in the anti-­official narratives of He Shang, alerted the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to what it saw as a new wave of Western cultural imperialism and the potential danger that China would transition peacefully to Western

190   Pan Wang c­ apitalism (heping yanbian) (Ong 2007, pp. 22–23; Zhang 2015, p. 87). These forces were also perceived to have triggered the pro-­democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989 (Yang and Lim 2010, p.  471) and the subsequent brain-­drain (naoli liushi) phenomenon that led to a ‘craze of going abroad’ (chuguore) (Zhao 1996). These nationalist views concerning the perceived movement towards the West not only led to national campaigns against foreign ‘spiritual pollution’ and ‘bourgeois liberalization’ but also strongly shaped the ways in which the PRC media reported Western countries. Because of Communist Party pressure, the Chinese media was drawn into these national campaigns and obliged to respond with negative views of Western influence in an attempt to safeguard Marxist–Leninist ideology and Communist Party rule. In this context, official anti-­foreign and anti-­Chinese–foreigner intimacy discourses continued to evolve and became conflated with national campaigns against the West. Chinese people who went overseas were accused of ‘blindly idolizing and fawning on everything foreign’ (chongyang meiwai) and hence were judged ‘insufficiently patriotic’ (Fang et al. 2002, pp.  14–15). This was despite the fact that many Chinese went overseas to pursue academic qualifications with the ultimate aim of returning and settling in China (Zhao 1996). Chinese citizens (mostly women in their late twenties and early thirties) who dated or married foreigners were interpreted as ‘marrying up’ for social and economic gain through international marriage. These women were portrayed as using international marriage as a ‘springboard’ (tiaoban) to climb the social and economic ladder or to improve their life circumstances. Correspondingly, foreign (male) citizens were objectified as ‘passports’, ‘green cards’ and ‘flight tickets’, and they were usually portrayed as 10 to 15 years older than their Chinese partners. Constable (2003) describes this pattern of marriage mobility as ‘global hypergamy’ in which women exchange their youth and beauty for improved social and economic status. She also pointed out the paradoxical and complex nature of such marriages, as sometimes ‘marrying up’ may essentially bring downward mobility. For instance, she points to the case of a ‘White collar’ Chinese woman with a doctorate from Shandong province marrying a truck driver with a high school degree from Washington (Constable 2003, p. 167). The media often associated these gendered cautionary tales of a hypergamous nature with personal tragedy and disappointment. For example, a news article titled ‘Striking at the Heart of Chinese–Foreign Marriages’, published in the Legal Morning Post in 2005, documented the story of a well-­educated Chinese woman in her early twenties who broke up with her long-­term Chinese boyfriend and married ‘Tom’, an Amer­ican man 15 years older than her, because she was bored with her monotonous life in China. However, after the woman moved to the USA, she became a victim of domestic abuse as Tom was a violent alcoholic (Liu 2005). Similarly, a 1996 article in Zhejiang Daily titled ‘Dream Ends in Baghdad’ described the tragic story of a beautiful young Chinese woman introduced by friends to a fake Iraqi ‘millionaire’ whom she then married (Ji 1996). The woman was depicted as ‘marrying up’ for an affluent life overseas but when she

International romance   191 arrived in Baghdad, she discovered her husband, ‘Ba’, was married and had a son. She was then forced to work as a servant. She was abused and drugged by Ba, his wife and his local male cohorts. When she finally managed to flee to China, she ended up murdering her father, a hospital professional, who attempted to help her overcome drug addiction. Similar stories of Chinese women who attempted to ‘marry up’ but ended up ‘marrying down’ and living in disappointment overseas appeared to fill the void in the coverage of international romance. Such portrayals were juxtaposed with evil foreign men in international romances, testifying to the ongoing tension between China and the West. This can be seen as a continuing backlash by the government, which was endeavouring to suppress the prevalent pro-­Western discourse. While the government’s influence over these narratives was oppressive, the narratives can also be interpreted as liberating as they represent the triumph of Chinese intellectuals’ efforts to lobby the government to allow Chinese citizens further access to Western cultures and romance despite the unpredictable consequences. Taken as a whole, these emerging narratives of international romance were a by-­product of the increasing economic connections between China and the West. While they reflected the growing desire for and curiosity about foreign romance, despite its uncertainties, during the early reform period they also justified Chinese women’s hypergamy in foreign romance as an outcome of the economic disparity between China and the West. Although the government attempted to continue its ‘Occidentalist’ campaign by incorporating the problematic discourse of foreign romance, it had little success and was unable to prevent its citizens from pursuing foreign romance and foreign marriage.

Late 1990s to the late 2000s: love is the answer From the late 1990s to the new millennium, accelerated marketization and commercialization altered media practice in China and transformed the ways in which the media operated. The Chinese media became more liberal and enjoyed a greater degree of autonomy in comparison with the past (Donald et al. 2002; Zhao 1998). From 2003, the PRC government started to withdraw funding from state-­owned media outlets and instructed these newspapers and magazines to earn at least half of their revenue from private subscriptions. It also introduced regulations to further stimulate investment in new television stations and extended broadcasting hours to enhance the independence and competitiveness of the television industry (Jeffreys and Edwards 2010, p. 4; Wang 2015, p. 14). These incentives propelled different media outlets, especially the unofficial media, to seek new ways to maximize audience ratings and advertising revenue. This subsequently stimulated the production of ‘light news’ (entertainment) and ‘human interest’ stories (Edwards and Jeffreys 2010, p.  4; Hvistendahl 2005), including love stories featuring Chinese–foreign intimate relationships and intercultural romance. These ‘exotic’ stories appeared to successfully capture the interest of the audience, and were disseminated in newspapers, magazines, radio

192   Pan Wang broadcasts, television shows, films and on the internet. Chinese newspapers, magazines and websites offered nuanced descriptions of encounters between international couples, their courtships and wedding ceremonies as well as hilarious anecdotes. The PRC media’s construction of Chinese–foreign romance can be divided into four categories. First, in contrast to the earlier period, love replaced hypergamy to become the main motive for Chinese (women) to enter into intimacy with a foreigner. Chinese women were depicted as modern and independent, having a similar age and occupational status as their foreign spouses. Some were university graduates, some were professional ‘white-­collar’ workers, some had an overseas study background and others were doctoral students with a competent level of English literacy (Chen 2003; Li 2007; Xin and Ye 2008). The group of ‘new modern women’ no longer needed to seek financial security from their male counterparts; instead, having greater power economically, socially and intellectually, they looked for real love and romance. This mirrors China’s changing dating culture since the country’s economic transition: Chinese women have become less ‘traditional’ and less constrained by Confucian doctrines and more ‘modern’ and egalitarian in their selection of a mate. Second, ‘Cinderella’ stories emerge as another form of the Chinese–foreign romance narrative. The big gap in social status, educational level and financial circumstances between many Chinese women (low socio-­economic background, from remote China) and foreign men (high profile, high social status, from the developed West) was used to underscore the importance of love as a determinant of intercultural romance (Gao 2005; ‘Mima qingshu’ 2008; Yang 2008). For example, a 2008 news article titled ‘Google “translated” an International Romance’ narrates the story of a British businessman named John and a female migrant, Fang Qin, who worked as a customer assistant in Zhejiang province. It describes how the British man used multiple techniques together with Google translator (he could not speak Chinese) to pursue Fang Qin after their first encounter in Fang’s shop. Despite Fang’s hesitation and initial opposition from her family, John proposed to his ‘Cinderella’. The article claims that John said meeting Fang Qin was the best thing that had happened since he arrived in China; he was deeply in love with her and determined to marry her. He also commented that Chinese people were warm and friendly, hence he was also in love with China, in particular Wukang (Zhejiang province) where the couple now reside. The article ends with John’s saying, in English, ‘Wu Kang, my home!’, with the narrative’s conclusion suggesting that international love is not only between individuals but also between two nations. Third, similar rhetoric of foreign partners’ ‘love of China’ is not uncommon in the PRC media (Meng 2001; Wang et al. 2009; ‘Xiao Shancun li de yang guye’ 2007; Xin and Ye 2008). For example, a 2001 article in People’s Daily titled ‘Foreign Sons and Daughters-­in-law: A Glimpse of Chinese–Foreign Marriages’ documents the love stories of two Chinese–foreign couples. The first, between a Chinese woman and a British man, and the second, between a Chinese woman and Swedish man, are described as being based on a love of Chinese

International romance   193 culture. In the first case, the cultural artefacts are the poems of the famous Tang Dynasty poet, Du Fu (712–770), and in the second instance, an assorted collection of memorabilia relating to the PRC’s revolutionary leader, Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976)—traditional Chinese porcelain, silk crafts and cloth tigers (Meng 2001). An episode of Family Studio that aired on Shanghai Oriental TV in 2009, titled ‘The life of a German Bride in China’, narrates the Chinese dream of a German woman who aspired to come to China when she was a child, her admiration of the Chinese film Red Sorghum (dir. Zhang Yimou, 1987), the music of Teresa Teng (1953–1995), a Taiwanese Mando-­pop singer and the Kung Fu comedy films of Jacky Chan. Similarly, ‘Tangya’ also collects Chinese porcelain and curios and prefers to eat with chopsticks rather than a knife and fork. She also admitted that Guo Fucheng, a Hong Kong singer, was her idol and dream husband. Hence, she had desired to marry a Chinese man even as a teenager. The final rhetorical category found in Chinese media is where the form of ‘China affection’ is portrayed as having reversed the pattern of transnational migration. A rising number of couples are shown as choosing to live in China rather than moving overseas, and other Chinese–foreign couples relocate from wealthy industrial countries to Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao and Tianjin. These places are perceived as emerging cosmopolitan cities that offer ample opportunities for employment, business and personal development (‘Cunli de Meiguo xifu’ 2009; Li 2004; Ma 2009; Yuan and Du 2005; Zhao 2007). For example, a 2007 article in The Peoples’ Daily reports that 35-year-­ old Lili met her German husband ‘Bei De’en’ while studying in Germany. The couple fell in love and decided to settle in Beijing after their marriage. The article states that Bei De’en was full of happiness saying, ‘Beijing is a great place, I will relocate my business to China, doing my best to adapt to the local customs’ (Wu and He 2007). Moreover, many Chinese celebrities, including the film actresses Shi Ke, Siqin Gaowa and Ning Jing, the 1994 Olympic figure skating medallist Chen Lu and film actor Zhang Tielin, all of whom married foreigners and had previously lived overseas (some acquired foreign nationality), are portrayed as returning to China with their families as China is their home at heart (‘Siqin Gaowa: Ruishi bushi wo de jia’ 2006; ‘Wo weishenme yao chengwei Meiguoren?’ 2008). In a similar fashion, renowned foreign citizens who married Chinese citizens—e.g. Canadian comedian and television host Mark Roswell (‘Da Shan’) and Amer­ican actor Jonathan Kos-­Read (‘Cao Cao’)—have been portrayed as identifying themselves as Chinese, living happily with their Chinese wives and children in the PRC. Taken as whole, love is portrayed as the dominant motivating factor in intercultural dating and marriage in China’s new millennium. These accounts highlight the attractiveness of contemporary Chinese citizens to foreigners, the emotional attachment of foreign citizens to Chinese culture, their enthusiastic pursuit of the ‘Chinese dream’ and their willingness to acquire ‘Chinese identities’ and to integrate into the Chinese way of life. These narratives reverse the previously popular discourses that emphasized the attraction of Chinese citizens

194   Pan Wang to ‘all things foreign’ and the earlier hypergamy of Chinese women in relation to international intimacy. Moreover, by inverting the common construction of the ‘Western other’ (Occidentalism), the PRC media inaugurated the ‘Western self ’, bringing China and the ‘West’ closer. This rhetoric has fostered a cosmopolitan public sphere where both Chinese citizens and foreigners share common interests, values and a cultural identity that is Chinese. However, a closer examination of these narratives, particularly of those centred on China’s modernity and ‘Chinese fever’, reveals that a sense of Sino­ centricism remains embedded in the discourse. The underlining notion appears to be that China’s revival and its current modernization is a renaissance of its own culture rather than a product of Westernization (Boden 2015, p. 124). This signifies a reversal in the power relations between China and its Western counterparts since the new millennium.

Mid-­2000s to the late 2000s: deception, bigamy, adultery and domestic violence The mid-­2000s onwards saw a rising number of media reports of relationship breakdown in Chinese–foreign intimate relations, associated with key problems of deception, bigamy, adultery and domestic violence (Wang 2015). Deception, intertwined with adultery and even bigamy, was mostly on the side of foreign males, including Chinese-­born men who had taken foreign nationalities. For example, a 2005 report in the Nanjing Daily and a 2009 report in the Chongqing Evening News both exposed stories of Chinese men with foreign nationalities falsely claiming they were single when registering their marriages with women in China (Ni 2005; Luo 2009). The 2005 report also describes how a Chinese woman from Nanjing did not marry her foreign boyfriend until she had first confirmed his single status. This was in response to the perceived common practice among male foreign nationals at social gatherings in China of checking if all members of the group had a ‘Chinese wife’ (second wife) (Ni 2005). Other reports delivered cautionary tales of Chinese women being dumped by Australian and Amer­ican men who exploited their money and resources while holidaying in China (‘Cong Xuenaiyin’an kan Zhong Ao kuaguo hunyin: Zhongguo xin’niang de beiju’ 2009; Hu 2007; Wang 2008). These men were portrayed as taking advantage of their Chinese partners by living off them and ‘borrowing’ money from them to cover their own costs in China. As soon as they finished their ‘holiday’, they either asked for a break-­up or divorce or simply ‘evaporated’ (Hu 2007; Zhang 2008). Other foreign men reportedly pretended to be wealthy, successful businessmen manipulating the hypergamous desires of Chinese women for a better life abroad. Once a relationship was established (commonly online, through dating websites first, and then offline), the men ‘borrowed’ money from these women on the pretext of ‘doing business’ in China, but never returned it (‘Nüzi wanglian qingxin waiguo “fushang”, shenmi xiangzi pianzou jukuan 23 wan’ 2008; ‘Weizhuang haiwai chenggong renshi yinman hunyin zhuangkuang’ 2009).

International romance   195 Deception is also portrayed as a collective effort by both illegal marriage introduction agencies in China and foreign ‘marriage swindlers’ (huntuo). Chinese women who subscribed to and paid exorbitant fees to find a foreign partner via marriage agencies reportedly either received no service from these agencies or were betrayed by the foreign ‘husbands’ they were introduced to. A 2006 article in the Family Weekly revealed that a Chinese woman named Liu Jing paid RMB12,000 (US$1,500) to meet an Amer­ican man named Jack. They married shortly after they met, and Liu Jing gave Jack RMB150,000 (US$18,750), which he said was required to apply for a spouse visa for her to travel to the USA. However, the visa never materialized, and Jack disappeared (Miao 2006). Similarly, a 2008 report documented a large group of female clients’ complaints against Yi Guanglian, a company established by Qi Yaomin in Guangzhou, with which they registered to meet a foreign partner. The complaints included that the company charged extra money to fund the travel costs of foreign males to visit the women in China. The women also claimed they had received identical letters from supposedly different foreign partners, and that they had discovered that the men were sleeping with other women in the hotel soon after their visit (‘International Marriage Broker sent to Prison’ 2008). The term ‘domestic violence’ was introduced into China’s new marriage law (2001), which stipulated that domestic violence was both prohibited and grounds for divorce (Marriage Law of the PRC 2001, Articles 3 and 32). However, China did not implement a national law against domestic violence until 1 March 2016. The law legally defines domestic violence, prohibits any form of domestic violence and outlines the intervention measures. The law covers both cohabiting couples and married couples residing in the PRC (Anti-­ domestic Violence Law, PRC 2016). The Chinese media started to report domestic violence as a problem in Chinese families in the early 2000s, with claims that it affected around 30 per cent of Chinese–Chinese marriages. An estimated 90 per cent of the abusers were males and their victims were females and children (‘Family Violence Becomes Public Evil in China’ 2003). The victims experienced different degrees of verbal, physical and psychological abuse, including coercion, restriction of personal freedom, economic control and rape within marriage (ACWF and NBS 2011).  Reports of domestic violence in the context of Chinese–foreign intimacy are also gendered. The common narratives are of foreign males as perpetrators of domestic violence and sexual abuse and brutality, whereas Chinese women victims are portrayed as vulnerable to abuse, especially those who had wanted to marry foreigners and live overseas for a ‘better life’. According to the reports, Chinese women who lived abroad have been beaten by their foreign partners, resulting in injuries ranging from bruises to fractures, with some hospitalized. Others were insulted and spat upon by their husbands or subjected to other forms of abuse, e.g. being forced to bark like a dog and constant rape and verbal abuse (‘Cong Xuenaiyin’an kan Zhong Ao kuaguo hunyin: Zhongguo xin’niang de beiju’ 2009; Liu 2005; Shuai and Jiang 2007). As a result, it was reported that some women chose to keep silent, while others responded to violence with

196   Pan Wang v­ iolence by physically attacking their partners with knives or sharp weapons, leading to tragic consequences (Liu 2005; ‘Zhongguo xin’niang zai ha Ri hunyin li tongku jian’ao’ 2008). These reports used self-­condemnatory and cautionary quotations from lawyers to underscore the notion that domestic violence is a typical problem for Chinese–foreign couples living overseas. The abuse is interpreted as flowing from cultural differences and a lack of support from China, making Chinese women prone to victimhood. These reports are gendered Occidental narratives with foreign males stereotyped as having a propensity for infidelity, deception, adultery, bigamy and domestic violence, and some men as conspiring with illegal international marriage agencies to exploit Chinese women. There are few reports of equivalent ‘demonic’ behaviour in intimate relationships between Chinese males and foreign women. One exception is the case of Li Yang, the founder of ‘Crazy English’, who reportedly, in 2011, abused his Amer­ican wife Kim Lee over trivial matters, leading to wide public condemnation and discussion about domestic violence. This in part reflects the overwhelmingly small number of romances and marriages between Chinese men and foreign women in the PRC. Of the Chinese–foreign marriages registered in the PRC, over 85 per cent involve Chinese women and fewer than 15 per cent Chinese men. However, when taken in conjunction with the media’s positive portrayal of Chinese men who date or marry foreign women, these reports have reinforced the dichotomy of ‘bad foreign partners’ versus ‘good Chinese husbands’ in the context of Chinese–foreign romance. In doing so, Occidentalism is employed to implicitly encourage Chinese women to ‘marry in’ rather than ‘marry out’, as one possible solution to the perceived social problem of the oversupply of bachelors caused by the ‘one-­child policy’ which applied in China from 1979 to 2015. Occidental narratives have thus shifted the responsibility for problems associated with ­Chinese–foreign intimacy from the government to individuals.

Early 2010s to the present: ‘dangerous love?’ While romantic love stories between Chinese citizens and foreigners continued to proliferate throughout the 2000s, the demonized image of foreign males stabilized and culminated in the ‘dangerous love’ campaign launched by the PRC government in April 2016. To promote China’s first national security education day on 15 April 2016, following successful implementation of the National Security Law in July 2015 (National Security Law, PRC 2015, Article 14), Chinese authorities created a 16-panel cartoon poster titled ‘Dangerous love’ (weixian de aiqing). The posters, reproduced in Figure 11.1, were displayed in public spaces, i.e. subway stations, billboards, government bulletins and residential compounds. They were deployed to warn Chinese women to be cautious of male foreign spies disguised as romantic lovers who intended to steal China’s secrets (Tatlow 2016). In other words, the cartoon posters discouraged Chinese women from dating potentially dangerous foreign males as they could compromise China’s national security.

International romance   197 As shown in Figure 11.1, the foreign man, ‘David’, is cast as a fake Chinese studies scholar who is seducing a young Chinese civil servant with the surname ‘Li’ at a dinner party. After expressing his love for Li, David and Li start a relationship. While complimenting her on her beauty and taking a romantic walk together, David successfully obtains internal documents from Li in the name of scholarly research. However, both are arrested by China’s national security officials as a result. Li sits handcuffed, accused of violating national laws. She bursts into tears when she realizes that David has taken advantage of her. The cartoon/poster ends with the PRC police warning of the consequences and penalties for violating PRC criminal and counter-­espionage laws. The poster neither criminalizes nor discriminates against Chinese–foreign intimacy. However, a clear message from the government is that romance involving foreigners—especially romance that involves a Chinese state employee—is subject to self-­censorship and public scrutiny. This can be seen as a new form of official Occidentalism, following that of the Mao era. By criticizing the ‘other’ as untrustworthy, the poster reflects China’s proactive self-­defence against negative foreign influences in the twenty-­first century. It also symbolizes the PRC government’s imposition of patriotism, asking its citizens to be conscious of the potential danger foreigners represent and urging them to prioritize China’s national interest. As this propaganda is presented in the genre of a comic, it helps to convey the state’s message to both adults and children and works to reinforce people’s national identity as Chinese citizens along with its associated responsibilities.

Figure 11.1 ‘Dangerous love’ poster. Source: Kennedy, M. 2016; photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP.

198   Pan Wang The poster reflects the growing sensitivity in Sino-­foreign relations in recent years. In part this can be attributed to the new wave of anti-­foreign sentiment in China from the early 2010s, ignited by two cases of sexual harassment of Chinese women by foreign men in public. It has been reported that on the evening of 8 May 2012, a drunk British man molested a young Chinese woman in a street near Tiananmen Square; the man was then beaten by angry passers-­by. This assault was videotaped and caused outrage online in China. Soon after, photos of the same offender sexually harassing Chinese women on Beijing subways were also exposed online to netizens (‘Foreigners in China— Barbarians at the Gate, Again’ 2012). Another incident involved a Russian man named Vedernikov, who reportedly put his feet up on the back of the seat of a Chinese female passenger during a train journey from Shenyang to Beijing. When she objected he insulted her in Mandarin. He was tracked down by netizens who circulated video footage of the incident and revealed that the man was principal cellist in the Beijing Symphony Orchestra. Vedernikov was suspended from his position despite later apologizing for his behaviour (Shi 2012). These incidents angered Chinese netizens, who expressed strong resentment, including xenophobic condemnation of these foreigners, urging them to go back to their own countries and calling on the government to ‘clean out foreign criminals in China’. On 15 May 2012, Beijing began tightening controls on foreigners in China. The central government initiated a 100-day campaign to crack down on illegal foreign entry, residency and employment and encouraging people to inform on any suspect foreigners (Grammaticas 2012; ‘Sweep Out the Foreign Trash: Is Anti-­foreigner Sentiment Trending in China?’ 2012). This campaign was praised by many Chinese bloggers. In supporting the campaign, CCTV’s English-­language news anchor Yang Rui expressed his anger through his Weibo post, saying ‘the police need to clean out the foreign trash, we should arrest foreign troublemakers and protect innocent young women’. He also urged the Chinese people to ‘learn to recognize the foreign spies who find a Chinese girl to shack up with while they make a living compiling intelligence reports’ (‘Foreigners in China—Barbarians at the Gate, Again’ 2012). Incidents of foreigners behaving badly have been reinforced in recent years by other reports about foreigners in China, e.g. the increasing number of Sino-­ African marriages and ‘Southeast Asian brides’ who marry Chinese men through illegal channels. These reports have led to growing online discussion centred on foreigners and foreign partners of Chinese citizens in China. The discourses are divided and fragmented; some are nationalistic in tone, expressing anti-­foreign sentiments, signifying a new wave of nationalism against ‘bad’ foreigners. I call this ‘digital Occidentalism’ mobilized by Chinese nationalists. However, at the same time, other online commentators are debating and condemning the xenophobic commentaries, voicing a defence of ‘good’ foreigners in China, thereby striking a balance between nationalism and patriotism. These discourses have in turn stimulated further discussion and debate on international love and romance in China, as evidenced by growing media

International romance   199 coverage on the topic and by a diversification in the self-­narrated stories and commentaries about Chinese–foreign intimacy on social media. This active debate around the issue suggests that the public has not been convinced by the government’s message that international romance can be ‘dangerous’.

Conclusion In summary, international love and romance in China mirrors the history of China’s foreign relations. Despite China’s opening-­up in the 1980s, a residual anti-­capitalist ideology from the late 1970s to the mid-­1980s discouraged the Chinese from forming romantic relationships with foreigners. International love was imagined as dangerous and disreputable, especially in the eyes of the Maoist generation. However, when China opened its door wider and established diplomatic goodwill with the outside world during the late 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese public’s perception of foreign (in particular Western) ideas and of foreigners was overturned and replaced by a seemingly unstoppable ‘Western fever’. In response, and in line with the top-­down anti-­foreign ‘mania’ campaign, the Chinese media delivered cautionary tales centred on Chinese women’s hypergamy and their subsequent disappointment in foreign marriages, encouraging the public to reconsider international romance. The PRC media’s commercial transformation in the new millennium led to diverse productions of Chinese–foreign romantic stories. On the one hand, romantic love became the dominant narrative and was simultaneously converted into love of China. On the other hand, problems associated with Chinese–foreign romance were portrayed as mainly caused by foreign males. The demonized construction of foreign males culminated in China’s ‘Dangerous love’ campaign in the mid-­2010s, when the state worked to strengthen its national security in the context of a new wave of anti-­foreign sentiment. The injection of political ideas into the Chinese–foreign romance narrative further complicated the picture, leaving the public to re-­assess and re-­imagine international love and romance in China.

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202   Pan Wang ‘Sweep Out the Foreign Trash: Is Anti-­foreigner Sentiment Trending in China?’. 2012. eChinacities.com, 27 May. www.echinacities.com/china-­media/Sweep-­Out-the-­ForeignTrash-­Is-Anti-­Foreigner-Sentiment-­Trending-in-­China (accessed 10 April 2018). Tatlow, K. D. 2016. ‘China’s “Dangerous Love” Campaign, Warning of Spies, is Met with Shrugs’. New York Times, 21 April. www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/world/asia/ china-­foreign-spy-­warning.html (accessed 1 April 2018). Wang, Pan. 2015. Love and Marriage in Globalizing China. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Wang, Si. 2008. ‘Zhongduo beipian nüshi jiangshu ziji de shangxin wangshi’. [Numerous Women Tell Their Sad Stories]. Dangdai shenghuo bao, 26 November. Wang, Tianfu, Wang, Yuebin and Xiao, Bo. 2009. ‘Qianli yinyuan yixianqian, Yuenan nü fanyi jiadao Tianmuhu’ [Vietnamese Translator Marries at Tianmu Lake: Knot of True Love Tied across Thousands of Miles]. Changzhou ribao, 5 March. ‘Weizhuang haiwai chenggong renshi yinman hunyin zhuangkuang’ [Tricking Women into Marriage by Pretending to Be Successful Overseas Men]. 2009. Xinxi ribao, 18 September. ‘Wo weishenme yao chengwei Meiguoren?’ [Why Do I Want to Become Amer­ican?]. 2008. Wuhan wangbao, 21 November. Wu, Xuemei and He, Xin. 2007. ‘Shewai hunyin mianmianguan’ [Intercultural Marriages]. Renmin ribao, 13 June. ‘Xiao shancun li de yang guye’ [Small Village Foreign Son-­in-Law]. 2007. Qibin wanbao, 18 September. Xin, Kai and Ye, Xiaochuan. 2008. ‘Meishan xin’niang Meiguolang shangyan “Zhong” guoshi jiehun’ [Meishan Woman and Amer­ican Man Stage Chinese–style Wedding]. Sichuan meishan ribao, 10 January. Yang, Lijun and Lim, Chee Kia. 2010. ‘Three Waves of Nationalism in Contemporary China: Sources, Themes, Presentations and Consequences’. International Journal of China Studies 1 (2): 461–485. Yang, Ying. 2008. ‘Guge ‘yi’ chu yiduan kuaguo lianqing’ [Google ‘Translates’ Cross-­ cultural Love]. Jinri zaobao, 1 June. Yuan, Lanhua and Du, Zhanfan. 2005. ‘Qianshou shijie de yinyuan’ [Love Connects the World]. Zhongguo shehuibao, 25 May. Zhang, Qingfei. 2014. ‘Transgender Representation by the People’s Daily since 1949’. Sexuality & Culture 18 (1): 180–195. Zhang, Qingfei. 2015. ‘Sexuality and the Official Construction of Occidentalism in Maoist and Early Post-­Mao China’. European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (1): 86–107. Zhang, Zhiqiang. 2008. ‘Jilin jinbai nüzi weijia waiguolang zao piancai pianse’ [Nearly 100 Jilin Woman Cheated out of Love and Money]. Fushun wanbao, 6 March. Zhao, Dingxin. 1996. ‘Foreign Study as a Safety-­Valve: The Experience of China’s University Students Going Abroad in the Eighties’. Higher Education 31 (2): 145–163. Zhao, Junhui. 2007. ‘380 yu Chongqingren jinnian jie yanghun’ [Over 380 Chongqingese Entered into an Intercultural Marriage This Year]. Chongqing chenbao, 4 December. Zhao, Yuezhi. 1998. Media, Market and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line. Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press. ‘Zhongguo xin’niang zai ha Ri hunyin li tongku jian’ao’ [Chinese Brides Suffer in Chinese–Japanese Marriages]. 2008. Zhongguo funübao, 26 February.

Part IV

Queer voices

12 The emerging ‘national husband’ Queer female fantasy in popular culture Jamie J. Zhao

Introduction Accompanying the burgeoning Chinese media, creative and cultural industries of the twenty-­first century, an intriguing popular cultural discourse surrounding gender, sexual and cultural minorities can be observed. The emerging minority populations in this process involve but are not limited to lesbian and gay groups, androgynous stars and fan communities dedicated to same-­sex fantasies. These minoritarian subjects have been gaining greater public visibility, developing negotiative positions and inventing coping mechanisms in mainstream Chinese media and society (Engebretsen 2014). Meanwhile, a growing commodification and hierarchical treatment of their ‘non-­mainstream’ identities, practices and desires have also been prevalent in today’s globalist, neoliberal market (Engebretsen and Schroeder 2015). Against this background, this chapter explores queer forms of desire and intimacy surrounding China’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) cultures that have recently emerged in post-­2010 Chinese media and cultural productions. My research highlights both the disruptive potential and normative tendency of an omnipresent Chinese queer pop phenomenon. This ubiquity of queer desiring and imagining in various sectors of Chinese media and cultural industries evidences the heteronormative structure deeply rooted in mainstream Chinese culture. Meanwhile, the form of queer pop that survives from and thrives in contemporary China showcases a permeating non-­normative, heteropatriarchal-­challenging urge. This urge has been discursively voiced by gender, sexual and sociocultural minorities as pop media producers, performers or consumers who do not necessarily self-­identify as LGBT or queer. In particular, my analysis in this chapter focuses on the discursive formation of a queerly charged neologism called ‘national husband’ (guomin laogong). The formal term in Mandarin Chinese for ‘husband’ is zhangfu, which has been a highly gendered concept associated with ‘virtues or talents considered to be inherently or essentially masculine’ since Mencius (Grant 2009, p. 26). In contemporary China, the use of zhangfu often signals ‘the legal institutionalization of the conjugal nuclear family with its ideal of one husband, one wife (yifu, yiqi zhi)’ (Zurndorfer 2016, p.  13). In contrast, laogong, usually used in casual

206   Jamie J. Zhao c­ onversations to denote one’s male spouse, is ‘an ambiguous term, subject to common usage’, and ‘does not necessarily’ refer to monogamous, conjugal relationships (Liu 2017, pp.  176–177). The neologism ‘national husband’ was created by Chinese netizens in the early 2010s. It denotes a person who perfectly fits into Chinese women’s romantic fantasies. The ‘national husband’ imaginary caused a sensation in Chinese cyberspace after being widely used by Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter) fans of the young male investor Wang Sicong. Wang is the only child of one of the richest businessmen in Mainland China.1 He has been famous for his wealth, overseas educational background and extravagant and luxurious lifestyle.2 Given its origin, the term ‘national husband’ has come to be closely associated with a materialist form of Chinese romance imagined and celebrated by netizens. It underlines elitist, exquisite, tasteful lifestyle and appearance; a level of ‘high quality’ that signals the acutely divided social strata in post-­socialist China (Rofel 2007); and urban and cosmopolitan experiences. As I further illustrate in the chapter, these cultural implications of the phrase also have roots in the intertwined discourses on love and marriage in modern and contemporary China (Lee 2007; Xiao 2010). In the past few years, the term ‘national husband’ has been commonly used in both mainstream media and cyber grassroots spaces. A number of pop media productions have been named after it and dedicated to its romantic imaginary, such as the television show National Husband (Tencent Penguin Picture, 2017), the online movie Who is National Husband (directed by Li Qi, 2016) and the popular song ‘National Husband’ by the male musical group VP1 (2016). Although it originated in a largely heterosexual, gendered context, popular imaginaries of the ‘national husband’ have always been queerly loaded. For instance, the phrase has been used by male fans online to refer to Wang as their ideal same-­sex partner. This queer use, though often in a joking manner, can be traced back to the rampant rumour about Wang’s bisexuality and his intimacies with a number of good-­looking, effeminate male celebrities, such as the Mainland actor Lin Gengxin.3 Moreover, Wang claims to be bisexual on his Weibo profile page, where he had more than 23,394,000 followers, as of September 2017. This context further adds a queer layer to the ideal romance symbolized by the phrase. It is also common for Chinese female celebrities and media characters (often with female masculine personas) to be described as ‘national husbands’ both in Chinese entertainment media coverage and by (predominantly female) media consumers. Some Asian male celebrities with typical ‘soft masculinity’ (Jung 2009) or androgynous beauty who embody a desirable combination of certain traits of Chinese Confucian ‘Wen masculinity’ (emphasizing cultural attainment) (Louie 2012) and globalized Asian metrosexuality, such as the Taiwanese actor Joseph Chang Hsiao-­chuan, have been referred to as Chinese gay males’ ‘national husbands’. Paying particular attention to this queer dimension of the term, my research unpacks the gendered subjectivity and troubles that arise from the term’s implied imagining of romantic love outside of a conventional Chinese-­specific conjugal

The emerging ‘national husband’   207 structure. I employ textual and discourse analyses to examine recently emerged female ‘national husband’ figures in Chinese televisual, music and celebrity industries. Three case studies are explored in the chapter: the Taiwanese star Bea Hayden Kuo in the film series Tiny Times (directed by Guo Jingming, 2013–2015); the actress Zhang Tian’ai, featured in the online television show about time travel and gender reversal/gender bending, Go! Princess Go! (LeTV, 2015); and FFC-­Acrush, the ‘fake’ boy band composed of five tomboyish Chinese girls. My analysis considers the texts, paratexts and contexts of the three cases that work together to produce the national husband imaginary. I demonstrate discursive practices in today’s Chinese media and pop cultural spaces that constitute and mediate the heteronormative discourses on queer female fantasies. In the following, I first offer a brief overview of the emergence and cultural representations of ‘love’ in China. I discuss how this conceptualization of love has shaped Chinese public imaginaries of same-­sex desires. I also review post-­ 2000 China’s political and media stipulations concerning homosexuality. In my analysis of the three case studies, I employ a queer cultural studies approach to inspect the diverse ways in which the directors, celebrities, actresses, singers, consumers and fans negotiate queer meanings in a heteronormative-­structured society. I find a shared tendency in different sectors of the Chinese entertainment industries to ‘de-­politicize’ politically sensitive LGBT identities while commodifying or articulating queer pleasure. More specifically, my investigation of the first case of the lesbian rumours about the film star Bea Hayden Kuo reveals her self-­commodification of same-­ sex intimacies yet straightforward denial of lesbian identity. I reveal that netizens’ queer readings of Kuo draw heavily on heteronormative imaginings of queer female romance. The commercialization and de-­politicization of non-­ identitarian queer female fantasies are further illustrated in my second case study of the television actress Zhang Tian’ai, who rose to stardom for her transgender role in a television drama. The drama capitalizes on transgenderism and female masculinity through a series of heteronormative visual-­cultural techniques. To further boost her ‘national husband’ persona in public, Zhang plays with the boundaries between her heterosexual real-­life identity and transgender images in the show. In addition, online viewers remade a queer ending to the drama, which articulates a contemporary gender/sexual non-­normative romance. Yet, these queer narratives and revisions that either tease or directly challenge China’s heteronormative contemporaneity were eventually censored by the government. The final case study of the tomboy music band Acrush reveals that the capitalist manipulation of female masculinity is legitimized as feminist expression and free spirit. Nevertheless, the band’s short-­lived popularity unveils the persistent heteronormative ostracizing of gender non-­normative female images. In the concluding section, I summarize my findings and discuss the sociocultural implications of the emerging queer ‘national husband’ imaginary in China. Ultimately, bridging lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) studies, Chinese gender and women studies, and media and fan studies, this chapter interrogates the underexplored disharmonies and mutual implications

208   Jamie J. Zhao between LGBT identities, queer culture and feminist politics, especially when they are appropriated by the capitalist world and/or are strategically employed by minority subjects. The ‘national husband’ imaginary epitomizes the mechanisms underlying Chinese entertainment culture’s unabashed capitalization of minority, grassroots cultures. Meanwhile, its related queer fantasies and practices unmask the crisis and anxieties of a heteronormative society. The emergence and popularity of female ‘national husband’ figures open up certain gender-­transgressive, monogamy-­disruptive media and desiring spaces, though ones with limited social-­political potential. They offer interventions to the persistent, state-­promoted hetero-­patriarchal expectations of conjugal roles that women are taught to fulfil.

An emerging queer form of love in contemporary China The concept of ‘love’ (ai) emerged and has been constantly reinvented as a dominant discourse in modern and contemporary Chinese public cultures. Its meaning has been closely intertwined with particular historical situations and political reforms. For instance, Haiyan Lee (2007, p. 5) records that ‘love’ was deployed as ‘a symbol of freedom, autonomy, and equality’ in literary and theatrical texts during the May Fourth New Culture Movement (around 1919). This framing of love aimed to challenge the traditional Chinese culture characterized by an ‘authoritarian family system, the subjugation of women, and the lack of individual freedom and autonomy’ (Lee 2007, p.  5). Similarly, Leon Rocha (2010, p.  609) finds that along with Chinese intellectuals’ translation and importation of Western scientific knowledge on sex and sexuality at the beginning of the twentieth century, love was appropriated in China’s self-­modernizing process and thus became further ‘sexualized, eroticized’ (instead of being purely platonic) in heterosexual relationships. Following this reconfiguration of love as a combination of physical and spiritual intimacies, the modern Chinese term for homosexuality, tongxing ai (same-­sex love), emerged as part of local sexological knowledge in the 1920s (Rocha 2010, p. 610). Furthermore, as Tze-­lan Sang (2003, p. 118) points out, during this period ‘tongxing ai is primarily signified as a modality of love or an intersubjective rapport rather than as a category of personhood, that is, an identity’.  In today’s China, pop cultural imaginations surrounding love are often interwoven with neoliberal and neo-­Confucian ideals of women’s familial–marital roles. For instance, Hui Xiao’s (2010, p. 748) study of gendered representations in post-­reform (after 1980) Chinese literary and televisual narratives illustrates that, in responding to China’s ‘expanding neoliberal economy and revived patriarchy’, love has been reimagined as a learned ‘capacity’ (nengli) for women in heterosexual relationships. As Xiao further explicates, love once signalled feminist ‘yearnings for romantic love and liberal individualism’ in the works of women writers of 1980s China (Xiao 2010, p.  748). Yet, since the 1990s, Chinese literary and televisual representations of love and marriage indicate that ‘the converging forces of a transnational middle-­class culture and an indigenous “harmonious society” campaign [have been working] towards reshaping

The emerging ‘national husband’   209 women’s role to be the administrator of domestic consumption as well as the repository of romanticized “traditional feminine virtues” ’ (Xiao 2010, p.  752). In particular, post-­2000 Chinese romantic love stories often present a hetero-­ patriarchal marital discourse in which ‘lovable’ Chinese women need to obtain both cosmopolitan and traditionally virtuous feminine qualities through constant self-­discipline, self-­management and self-­transformation of their own bodies and domestic lifestyles (Xiao 2010, pp.  735–737). In a similar vein, Luzhou Li’s (2015, p.  532) study of Chinese matchmaking reality television also demonstrates that, under the disguise of free choice regarding love and marriage, this kind of heterosexual romance-­focused media serves as a neoliberal cultural venue to legitimize the subordination of women through ‘the collusion between commercialism and patriarchy’ of post-­2010 China. Drawing on this cultural specificity of love in Chinese public and popular discourses, this chapter further unpacks how queer forms of love in contemporary China are made possible yet ambiguous, self-­contradictory and sometimes even discriminatory and normative. Rather than searching for explicitly self-­identified lesbian (or bisexual) Chinese celebrities and media figures, I view the disruptive, performative, pejorative and unstable essences of queerness as indicative of the abundant ‘doing and becoming’ female gender and sexual deviance in public spaces (Bachner 2014, p.  201). I use queer to describe both the transgressive power and the capitalist manipulation residing in the commercialization, performance and celebration of non-­normative female genders and sexualities. Female sexuality in China ‘has been deployed precisely to reinforce and ­reinvigorate the claims of the patriarchal family’, while ‘[g]ender differences and hierarchies have been structured and maintained through normative heterosexuality’ (Sang 2003, p.  276). Ironically, the celebration and capitalization of female same-­sex romance in mainstream media and public spaces show that queer can flow—and indeed has been flowing—in and through this hetero-­ patriarchal nation-­state. This self-­contradiction, ambivalence and ubiquity of queer pop traffic in the capitalist world of post-­2010 China intentionally draws on and plays with historical trajectories and contemporary ideals of love. In so doing, these queer imaginaries not only unsettle the state’s heteronormalization of mainstream society but also challenge the reductionist understanding of LGBT identities and queer culture as ‘liberal’ (Halperin 2003, p. 341). Additionally, China’s media censorship and cultural policies concerning same-­sex intimacies have also contributed to the emergence of this commercialization of queer love. Following the 1997 delegitimization and 2001 depathologization of homosexuality, the Chinese government has held an extremely ambiguous attitude toward LGBT cultures and groups, known as ‘not encouraging, not discoursing, and not promoting’ (Jia and Zhou 2015). Between 2008 and April 2018, official media censorship and regulations have deemed homosexual topics and content ‘abnormal’ and ‘perverted’. Some stipulations directly aligned homosexuality with ‘pornography, sex, and vulgarisms’, in the expectation that these topics would be excluded from Chinese mass media (Jia and Zhou 2015). Since 2000, LGBT film festivals and communicative platforms, as well as fan

210   Jamie J. Zhao sites dedicated to same-­sex fantasies and cultures, have also gone through waves of censorship and crackdowns (Zhao et al. 2017). In the 2010s, along with a series of structural changes to China’s executive media censorship system, official policies regarding homosexuality in the mass media have been constantly revised. However, explicit portrayals of same-­sex sexual tensions and intimacies today remain largely censored and carefully regulated in mainstream discourses (including official, legal, educational and media dialogue) (Zhao 2018a). For example, in 2016, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) issued a set of new stipulations that unequivocally disapproved of media materials that ‘express or display abnormal sexual relations or sexual behaviour, such as incest, homosexuality, perversion, sexual assault, sexual abuse, and sexual violence’ or that ‘promote unhealthy views of marriage and relationships, including extramarital affairs, one-­night stands, and sexual freedom’ (Shaw and Zhang 2017, p.  273). One notable case that was impacted by this censorship was the 2016 popular online gay-­themed television drama, Addicted (iQiyi, China, 2016). The show was pulled off the air for its gay portrayals, which were suspected of promoting ‘vulgar, immoral, and unhealthy content’ and ‘the [exaggerated] dark side of society’ (Ellis-­Petersen 2016). Yet, media producers and directors often ‘embrac[e] resilience’ and constantly and pragmatically tailor their agenda and adjust their ways of production and distribution in response to the state’s practising of ‘morality’ regulation (Guo 2017, p.  488). For instance, Chinese independent film-­makers often creatively utilize social networking and video-­streaming sites to exhibit their LGBT-­themed documentaries (Shaw and Zhang 2017, p. 285). For these reasons, China’s media regulations on LGBT representations cannot be simplified as either ‘repression’ or ‘liberalization’. Instead, two often entangled discourses, ‘self-­censorship’ and ‘political-­ideological manipulation of LGBT culture’, can be identified (Zhao 2018a). Take, for example, the most recent wave of crackdowns on LGBT culture in cyberspace and on television in April and May 2018. As part of an effort to build a harmonious online community, on 13 April 2018 Weibo announced a three-­month ban on online content related to homosexuality (Kuo 2018). Following a public protest against this ban, on 15 April the party-­state’s media outlet, the official newspaper People’s Daily, published a commentary on its online forum ‘Strong Nation Community’ (Qiangguo Shequ) criticizing the misunderstanding and disrespect shown towards homosexual people by cyber censorship.4 In response to this official criticism, Weibo soon revoked its purge of homosexual content.5 Nevertheless, on 9 May 2018, television scenes depicting LGBTQ cultures and symbols, such as scenes of a rainbow flag, were censored during China’s online airing of the foreign singing contest Eurovision (EBU 1956–). A few days later, on 13 May, two girls were assaulted by security guards at the Beijing 798 Art Zone for wearing rainbow badges that were given to them by an LGBT activist.6 These homophobic incidents can be interpreted as ‘the self-­censoring acts’ of online media broadcasters and officials in public spaces (Zhao 2018a). Meanwhile, the attitude of the People’s Daily hardly signals an LGBT-­supportive,

The emerging ‘national husband’   211 queer-­friendly gesture. In fact, the rhetoric of its criticism of Weibo’s ban, while acknowledging that ‘homosexuality is not a mental disorder’, is critical of Weibo for causing public anxiety. The commentary also encourages homosexual people to be self-­disciplined as socially responsible, ‘normal’ Chinese citizens. Viewed from this perspective, the official response seems to be more about maintaining China’s social-­political stability in a neoliberal discourse than leaning towards gender and sexual equality. One official media regulatory memo internally circulated in June 2018 further clarified the attitude of official censors towards LGBT culture. In particular, in order to create an ideologically positive, politically correct media environment, the memo ‘encourages self-­censorship’ of media producers and states that ‘homosexuality is respected, but gay-­themed content or gay characters are not allowed’ in mass media (Feng 2018). My examination of the female ‘national husband’ figure draws on these findings in the cultural discourses on love, female gender and sexuality, and in the media censorship of homosexuality. In the next section, I elaborate how queer forms of desire, intimacy and embodiment in contemporary romance are represented, negotiated and simultaneously (also, most often, normatively) compromised and naturalized in a predominantly heteronormative, patriarchal media environment.

Manufacturing female national husbands in contemporary Chinese pop culture A nationwide queer reading of a traditionally feminine celebrity One of the earliest female celebrities to be named a national husband by Chinese netizens was Bea Hayden Kuo, who is best known for her role in the film series Tiny Times. The film franchise is ‘famous for its constant deployment and marketing of female and male homosociality and homosexuality to a predominantly female fan audience’ by the rumoured-­to-be gay director Guo Jingming (Zhao et al. 2017, p. xvi). For example, a day before the debut of its fourth instalment in 2015, the director posted a picture on his Weibo account featuring the four main female leads (including Kuo) kissing each other on the lips. Another female star featured in the film, Yang Mi, has been married to a man for years and given birth to a daughter. Yet, on her Weibo pages Yang often gives a high profile to her ambiguous relationship with Kuo, though often in a joking manner. While Kuo herself usually presents a traditionally feminine look both on and off screen, a careful self-­exhibition of combined queer sexuality and traditional femininity has been employed in popularizing her celebrity persona and in publicizing media works with other gender non-­normative celebrities. One notable lesbian ‘incident’ that earned Kuo the national husband title was an online semi-­autobiographical story revealing the author’s own short-­term same-­sex romantic encounter with a Chinese-­speaking actress in Toronto, Canada. The post originally appeared on one of the most popular social networking sites, Douban.com.7 Yet, this queer romance was soon widely circulated in

212   Jamie J. Zhao Chinese cyberspace in 2012, especially among online lesbian communities. Although the original post did not reveal the name of the actress involved in the self-­narrated romance, the author shared some pictures of herself with the actress.8 Many netizens suspected that the person was Kuo, based on the strong similarities between the star who was involved in the story and Kuo’s appearance and personal and professional background.9 Soon after the rumour erupted, evidence that Kuo is a lesbian has gradually gathered in cyberspace. Some followers of Kuo’s Weibo account have pointed out that almost one-­fifth of her online friends, as well as her assistants, were masculine lesbian celebrities (some of whom are already publicly ‘out’) in China and Taiwan. In 2013, another Douban.com post revealed that Kuo liked a Weibo post that speculated about her lesbian identity. Since then, a growing number of fans have started to refer to Kuo as their ‘national husband’. According to many online discussions, this attention is because Kuo’s outward attractiveness makes her persuasive in playing either a dominant or a submissive lesbian sex role (gao yanzhi, kegong keshou).10 Soon after the circulation of the lesbian gossip, Kuo claimed that she ‘accidentally slipped and thus liked’ (shouhua dianzan), the post about her lesbian identity (i.e. she clicked the ‘like’ button on the social media platform by mistake).11 However, in 2014, some netizens looked into Kuo’s intimate relationship with the Taiwanese celebrity Jin Dai, a famous openly ‘out’ butch lesbian. The netizens had found on Dai’s blog some personal photographs of a private gathering between Kuo with Dai and other Taiwanese lesbian-­identified stars. The photograph with Kuo included a total of three masculine and three feminine women. Some Weibo users commented that the gathering captured in the photographs seemed to be a triple date involving three lesbian couples. After the wide circulation of similar lesbian ‘evidence’, topics related to Kuo’s lesbianism were often ranked as the hottest on the list of Weibo Hot Searching (resou). Kuo quickly and repeatedly denied these lesbian rumours during media interviews and in public announcements. Yet, interestingly, some high-­profile Mainland Chinese actresses and actors, such as Wang Luodan and Li Yifeng, even ‘liked’ and shared these news stories about Kuo’s possible lesbianism on their own Weibo pages, which furthered the netizens’ celebration of Kuo as a national husband. These seemingly trivial and chaotic posts of gossip and rumours surrounding Kuo’s lesbianism point to the Chinese public’s intricate, self-­conflicted queer imaginary of Chinese female gender and sexuality. During the process, Chinese netizens took active roles in intertextual readings and attempts to make sense of scattered information in a heterosexual-­dominated world. Meanwhile, some of Kuo’s self-­acclaimed heterosexual female fans expressed strong queer romantic and sexual desires towards good-­looking, feminine women, which debunked the dimorphism of heterosexuality and homosexuality. This practice also exemplified the ways in which queer sentiments, desires and readings—though often discriminative, ageist and lookist—are essential, constitutive cultural elements for mainstream media texts and normative cultural contexts.

The emerging ‘national husband’   213 Nonetheless, the evidence in support of Kuo’s lesbian identity was also paradoxically drawn from multilayered, problematic assumptions about a gendered female same-­sex relationship. Netizens frequently used information about Kuo’s background, such as that she used to be a football player before she became a model and actress12 and that she attended a girls-­only middle school,13 as strong evidence of her real-­life lesbianism. This logic replicates a normative way of thinking about lesbianism: that it is derivative and/or needs to be conditioned and explained within certain queer ambiences. Explanatory ambiences are typically those of girls-­only schools and female football teams, where cis-­males14— the naturalized objects of cis-­females’ desire in mainstream heteronormative imaginaries of love and romance—are absent and are replaced by masculine females.15 In other words, these queer imaginaries are eventually guarded by netizens and sustain the normative understanding of heterosexuality as original, natural and normal. Moreover, instead of serving as cultural signs for affirmative lesbians’ gender and sexual identifications, the ambiguity of Kuo’s real-­life sexuality and visibly feminine look combine to facilitate the media industry’s (as well as her own) capitalization on the ambiguous boundaries between different forms of non-­identitarian intimacies, such as ‘sisterhood’, female friendship and lesbian ‘erotic desires’ (se) (Sang 2003, p. 5). For instance, in 2013, Kuo worked with Zeng Yike, a gender non-­normative singer, rumoured to be lesbian, in the music video of Zeng’s new song Women’s Secrets (directed by Peng Youlun). The close emotional bonding between Zeng and Kuo represented in the music video and the queer-­connoting lyrics of the song led fans on Bilibili.com, the most famous participatory fan site in China, to label the video a work of ‘girls’ love’—a label that evoked narratives depicting female homoerotic/homosocial stories.16 The director of the music video, Peng, is also a gender non-­normative celebrity who is well-­known for producing queerly loaded media content featuring masculine female celebrities in the Chinese television and music industries, such as the famous boyish singer Li Yuchun.17 After the release of the song, Peng, Zeng and Kuo often appeared in public together and interacted on social media in an intimate manner. Kuo also participated in a number of variety shows and media interviews with Zeng, discussing their self-­acclaimed female friendship. Responding to these ‘clues’, one netizen created a chart suggesting a lesbian social network that involved Peng, Zeng, Kuo and other female celebrities and circulated the chart online. The successful intertwining of exploitation, interpretation and evaluation of Kuo’s possible lesbianism is paradoxically underpinned by the confirmed facts that Kuo has never publicly self-­identified as lesbian, and the media characters she plays in mainstream media have never been explicitly lesbian. The prevailing pejorative tone of the netizens who read her media images and private life as being queer also implies that netizens are not searching for serious, politically charged media representations of lesbians. Rather, these queer interpretations and representations are a Chinese-­specific form of yiyin, a fantasy-­based, light-­ hearted, entertaining practice that can be traced back to the late Qing dynasty (Feng 2013, p. 73).

214   Jamie J. Zhao Nowadays, the term yiyin (or YY in cyber communication) is widely used in Chinese fan communities to denote queer imaginings about same-­sex relationships. The original meaning of the term, which was first seen in the classic novel of imperial China Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong Lou Meng, written by Cao Xueqin in 1791), was ‘lust of the mind’ (Feng 2013, p.  73). As Rocha (2010, p. 608) articulates, the word yin, ‘traditionally a character used to qualify sexual behaviours, conjures a connotation of excess, an image of flooding or soaking, and is often combined with other characters to represent illicit sexual relations.’ The cultural practice of yiyin has therefore been considered entertaining yet unhealthy and thus something that should be limited to the imagination. Today’s queer use of yiyin draws heavily on the historical idea that ‘yin always already incorporates a moralistic warning, a normative prescription of what counts as legitimate sexual activity (reproductive, not overly frequent, with the correct partner)’ (Rocha 2010, p. 608). In this sense, yiyin or queerly imagining in the contemporary period delivers a sense of self-­confessing to the ‘abnormality’ of same-­sex desiring in the real world. Its contemporary use detaches queer imaginations from proper, legal sexual activities in the physical world (Zhao 2018b). This meaning of self-­delegitimization and de-­realization indicates that queer playing with female sexuality both in the media industry and by media consumers functions mostly as a form of non-­identitarian, de-­politicized entertainment. This form of queer entertainment is disassociated from and thus less threatening to the heteronormative reality. This point can be better substantiated by another case of a female national husband, Zhang Tian’ai, discussed below. A transgender national husband in a queer ambience The 2015 web television series Go! Princess Go! (hereafter GPG) manufactures a female national husband figure out of a time-­travel, gender-­reversal story—a literary and media genre that has been popular in Chinese-­speaking contexts for more than two decades (Feng 2013; Gong and Yang 2017). The actress Zhang Tian’ai plays the main character of this comic, postmodern drama—a princess in ancient China with a traditionally feminine look but a masculine, aggressive persona and strong sexual desires towards beautiful women. The contradiction surrounding the princess’s inner and outer selves is caused by a randy heterosexual man who used to live in contemporary China yet accidentally time travels to an unknown ancient past. The time-­travelling man finds himself trapped in the princess’s female body and surrounded by a number of the prince’s beautiful concubines. At first, he feels quite unconformable with his new female body, especially when experiencing menstruation, male–female penetrative sex and childbirth. Yet, after undergoing all kinds of struggles and pains in his conjugal and romantic relationships with the prince, he gradually accepts the female body and eventually acknowledges his sexual desire and spiritual love for the prince. As of 21 January 2016, GPG had received more than 2.4 billion hits on the Chinese video-­streaming site LeTV.com.18 Since the show’s broadcast, netizens have branded Zhang the new national husband for her attention-­grabbing

The emerging ‘national husband’   215 p­ erformance of transgender sexuality. It was rumoured that her Weibo account once attracted 250,000 followers within 24 hours during the show’s run.19 Adapted from an online novel, GPG’s storyline weaves together seemingly queer and feminist sentiments and intertextual information. Yet, its narratives also subjugate a transgender romance to conventional ideals of true love and normative gender and sexuality. The director, Lv Haojiji, has produced two different endings for GPG. In one, the time-­travelling man comes back to his male body in the contemporary era after both the princess and the prince are assassinated in the ancient time. However, reminiscing about his dreamy experience with the prince, the man desperately seeks to travel to the past again, even by risking his life, because he realizes the contemporary male body is not his (her) true self anymore. In the other ending, the man wakes up in his male body in a modern hospital and encounters a male doctor who looks exactly like the prince, which sparks his memory of his ancient lover. In contrast to the happy past presented in full colour, the contemporary space presented in both endings is in black and white. After the release of the two final episodes, on 19 December 2015, the director posted a short postscript on his Weibo page: All the imaginaries in Go! Princess Go! are a dream of the protagonist. His time-­traveling through streams of consciousness (yishiliu chuanyue) and all the strange visual-­cultural styles and settings are the imaginations in the protagonist’s mind. This show’s time-­traveling story—an imaginative form of time-­traveling—is different from other time-­traveling dramas featuring physical (bodily) forms of time-­traveling.20 Some researchers have applauded the creative endings of GPG for offering ‘a reflection on gendered identity and disguised desire’ and ‘an avant-­garde exploration of gender and genre’ (Gong and Yang 2017, p.  84). Nevertheless, the ways in which GPG ends can also be read as a strategic narrativization of the same-­sex eros and transgender attraction between the main characters as a result of a cross-­sex romance in the past. The director’s explication of the ending plotlines further implies a gloomy view or a direct denial of the possibility of resuming the romance as same-­sex love in the present. On the one hand, this manoeuvre seems to denaturalize queer desires between same-­sex (or transgender) couples in contemporary society by confining the happy ending to an ancient, chaotic, comic, dream-­like, colourful setting. On the other, it reflects the great frustration and dismay of contemporary people with transgender identities and/or queer desires who can only ‘dream of ’ consummating romances with a happy ending in a non-­contemporary (and even non-­serious) time–space. Furthermore, this seemingly queer show that mixes female/male same-­sex love and transgender romances can also be interpreted as a televisual allegory of ‘straightening’ tomboyish or transgender females/males into normal, adult, heterosexual, virtuous wives and good mothers—a female gender and sex role defined by Confucian familial–marital values. For instance, the princess’s exhibition of masculinity and sexual desires towards other beautiful concubines and

216   Jamie J. Zhao handmaidens are seen and tolerated as a reflection of immaturity, absurdity, innocence and indiscretion by the prince and other heterosexual females in the palace (see Figure 12.1). The prince is strongly attracted to the princess’s masculine persona, which evidences the non-­normative (and sometimes effeminate) desire of the prince himself. Yet, the story finds the prince using true love and morality as excuses to ‘transform’ the princess into a jealous and emotional, yet feminine and faithful, wife and mother. Take, for example, the princess’s initial objection to getting pregnant and giving birth due to her discomfort with the female body and sexual intimacies with men. The prince is infuriated by this rejection and responds: ‘You are violating all the heavenly laws of morality and filial love. Bearing children is your social responsibility and thus cannot be decided by your own will.’ After reluctantly going through menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth, the princess not only falls in love with the prince but also gradually becomes feminine inside and accepts the female body and sexual desires towards men. In response, the prince also decides to abolish the custom of concubine keeping in his palace and starts a new monogamous life with the princess. The story transforms an originally masculine cis-­female who is in a polygamous relationship and who resists male–female intimacy into a heterosexual, loyal wife and mother in a monogamous family. In doing so, it implicates a normative transition from queer-­loaded intimacies (not only between the prince and the princess but also between the princess and other concubines) in the

Figure 12.1 A screen capture from Go, Princess, Go!, showing the princess flirting with a maidservant before (s)he accepts the female body.

The emerging ‘national husband’   217 palace to an exclusive, heterosexual marriage that forcibly rules out the possibility of queer genders and sexualities (Guo 2013, p.  168). During these processes, female masculinity and non-­normative sexuality are considered a form of the rebellious mentality and immaturity of young women. This form of female masculinity is represented in GPG as a passing phase that can be temporarily tolerated and accepted by mainstream society, even sometimes being framed as a unique kind of charm. After all, the (temporary) masculinity is a crucial element in the national husband imaginary implied in the drama and celebrated by its viewers. Yet, this gender non-­normativity must be eventually ‘ameliorated’ to the ‘normal’ form of heterosexual femininity (Martin 2010). For example, after finding pleasure during her one-­night sexual encounter with the prince, the story portrays the princess as suddenly shrugging off her female masculinity and queer desires for women and starting to desperately long for sexual intimacies with the prince. This part of the plotline simultaneously unveils and replicates contemporary Chinese society’s heteronormative imaginations about lesbians as women who are unable to find ‘real’ men with whom to have enjoyable sex. Of course, these textual manoeuvres are not necessarily the director’s intentionally heteronormative design, but rather his discursive ridicule of and reluctant co-­opting by the Chinese heteronormative system, both on and off screen. In fact, the director is the only son of the famous Chinese romance novelist Haiyan. Both father and son have for many years been rumoured to be gay. Similarly, before the show’s debut, plenty of gay rumours circulated online about several male leads in GPG, such as Sheng Yilun, who plays the role of the prince, and Yu Menglong, who plays the admirer of the princess. Furthermore, in response to be branded as a national husband and questions about her real-­life sexuality, the actress Zhang ambiguously said: ‘I am a very straight woman in real life, but I cannot predict the future. In the show, I am bent [turned into being gay]. You are bent. Everybody is bent.’21 Zhang’s response once again confirmed her heterosexuality in reality. At the same time, she confined queer sexuality and desires, as well as the queer layer of national husband imaginary, to a non-­contemporary, fictional yet seemingly promising context. Based on this dense queer text and its subtext and context, numerous netizens celebrated GPG as a mixed form of boys’ love (stories depicting male homoeroticism and homosociality) and girls’ love (Gong and Yang 2017, p.  82).22 This was despite the ambiguity and paradoxes deployed and performed by the director and the stars of the show. Nonetheless, it is also difficult to ignore the fact that these queer narratives and interpretations were drawn from a story of a gender non-­normative cis-­female’s heteronormative transformation achieved in an eventually consummated cross-­sex romance in a past era. Many viewers felt the depicted transformation from a norm-­defying female national husband figure into a normative wife and mother framed in a traditional romance was disappointing and awkward. Some of them even periodically refer to GPG as A Story of the Princess’s Fertility (homophonic in the original title in Chinese).23 Some netizens, frustrated by the two pessimistic endings, made an alternative final

218   Jamie J. Zhao episode by re-­editing the available footage and posted the video online (Gong and Yang 2017, p. 84). This viewer-­made video narrates a happy ending between the princess and the prince, both of whom eventually travel to and reunite in the contemporary era. However, soon after this video was posted, on 20 January 2016, SAPPRFT banned the online broadcast of GPG for its potential ‘harm to society’s morals’.24 This put an end to the celebration and rewriting of this female national husband allegory in cyberspace. Tomboys as national husbands in a ‘fake’ boyband While the female celebrities discussed above have been branded national husbands by netizens, the newly formed Chinese pop group FFC-­Acrush (hereafter Acrush) has been explicitly marketed (or self-­made) as an exemplar of national husband imaginary by its agent company. The band, which debuted in April 2017, is composed of five young, masculine, good-­looking girls between 18 and 24 years old. It has contradictorily referred to itself as a ‘boyband’ composed of androgynous girls who cross-­gender impersonate men on stage.25 This marketization of Acrush as a national husband representative drew on both Chinese and inter-­Asian public cultural discourses on gender ambiguity and cross-­dressing performances. This framing eventually carved out a space in mainstream Chinese society for the visibility and survival of a band featuring Chinese ‘tomboys’. The term ‘tomboy’ or ‘t’, though derived from English, serves as a Chinese-­ specific term referring to young, masculine (or butch) lesbians. In particular, tomboy often represents a form of ‘ “permanent” lesbianism’ or restrictive lesbian identity in Chinese public culture (Martin 2010, p. 14). In contrast, traditionally feminine girls in lesbian romances (or femmes) are considered ‘temporary’ lesbians who will eventually grow out of this ‘abnormal’ phase (Martin 2010, p.  14). Consequently, Chinese-­speaking tomboy images often carry a heavy lesbian connotation. Yet, as Acrush’s performance and strategic explanations of female masculinity within a rhetoric of national husband imaginary demonstrates, these queer images are not necessarily linked to lesbian identities and sexualities in Mainland China. As some research shows, the androgynous personas of female celebrities often signal lesbian identities in the contexts of Hong Kong and Taiwan, which are relatively more LGBT-­friendly societies (Zhao 2017). In contrast, the public appearance of Acrush marks an ultimate form of de-­politicized queer entertainment. It results in an erasure of the subversive, progressive meanings embedded in Chinese tomboyism within a commercialized discourse. Instead, the androgyny of Acrush has been carefully framed under the camouflage of feminism, globalism and individualism in the real world. This camouflage can be seen in the band’s name. The first half of the band’s name, FFC, stands for ‘Fantastic Football Confederation’. According to Acrush’s agent, it signifies the public image of being ‘sunny, healthy, and full of positive energy’ (BBC 2017).26 Based on this framing, the agent also explained the group’s concept during media interviews as ‘a group advocating freedom, not

The emerging ‘national husband’   219 bounded by frames’ (Huang 2017). In turn, all the members are required to be trained to play football. This training has been awkwardly explained as a way for the company to support the government’s development of football playing (Huang 2017). Yet, the uncomfortable lining up of female football players with the gender non-­normative Acrush members (some of whom publicly admitted that they were not good at playing or had never played football) might also point to an indirect ‘normalization’ of female masculinity, cross-­dressing and cross-­ gender impersonation as a gendered quality or as a spirit required by aggressive sports. The second half of the band’s name, ‘Acrush’, means ‘beautiful youths on whom people have a crush’. It is a transcultural reference to the Greek divine figure Adonis, whose name has been frequently used to denote boys with great beauty (BBC 2017). Yet, the term is not a well-­known metaphor in Chinese-­ speaking contexts. This transcultural referencing and intercultural borrowing can also be found in the group members’ outward look, persona and style. Although based in the Zhejiang province of Mainland China and marketed as a Chinese ‘megastar homegrown’ band, Acrush members often wear light hair colours, short and trendy hairstyles, and K-­pop and J-­pop dancing clothes.27 Acrush has also performed and released singles online that are covers of K-­pop, J-­pop and Taiwanese pop songs originally sung by male singers. In addition, its members’ individual stage names, such as An Junxi and Min Junqian, strongly resemble Korean names, especially those used by Korean male idols. Also, during Acrush’s public performances and appearances, its members often wear ‘breast binders’, which are a visible signifier of lesbian sexuality and tomboyism. Binders are commonly used in Chinese-­speaking societies by female-­to-male transgender people and butch lesbians to flatten their chests without undergoing gender-­reassignment surgeries (Hu 2017, p. 12). Yet, binders are also often used in cross-­dressing performances, such as in theatrical performances in traditional Chinese operas and contemporary cosplay (costume play, a subcultural fan practice in which fans dress up like media characters), and in cross-­gender real-­life impersonation. These hybrid features of Acrush closely associate the group’s female masculinity with a gendered (yet not lesbian-­related) culture in an inter-­Asian context. It borrows and mixes the East Asian ‘soft masculinity’ (Jung 2009) embodied by male idols, cross-­dressing traditions and techniques and local Chinese female subjectivities. None of these context-­specific gendered practices and traditions indicate lesbian identity or political resistance against heteronormativity. More often, they are viewed as aesthetic variations or (quasi-­feminist) personal expression in Asian public cultures. The head of Acrush’s company, Wang Tianhai, has repeatedly confirmed to the media that Acrush does not attempt to deliver ‘a political message’ (Haas 2017). Instead, the group’s style is a Chinese national product, showcasing the fact that some Chinese girls ‘enjoy the male appearance, the carefree style and want to sing like men … [and] that girls can be a boyband too’.28 The beautiful youth metaphor highlighted in the band’s name is considered by their agent and manager as ‘gender-­free’ (Huang 2017).

220   Jamie J. Zhao The band’s play with non-­normative female genders has also heavily coloured Acrush’s publicity. What made Acrush a ‘boyband’ known to Chinese audiences was its group members’ first live performance at a concert in March 2017, organized by the video-­streaming company Tencent. The concert, titled ‘Husband Exhibition’, was one of various music events held at Chinese universities (see Figure 12.2). After Acrush members performed as newly rising national husband figures, there was a surge in their female fan communities in Chinese cyberspace. Within two months of the release of Acrush’s first song, ‘Action’, on 28 April 2017, the Weibo page of Acrush’s online support group attracted more than 712,000 fan followers (see Figure 12.3). Meanwhile, it was reported that many female fans formed group tours to airports to wait for Acrush’s arrival and called Acrush members their husbands.29 However, it is worth noting that Acrush is not the first music group of its kind to debut in China. As early as December 2010, a ‘beautiful youth band’ called V2, which comprised two tomboyish girls, Fu Jing and Zhang Youfang, debuted in Mainland China. After releasing one single, ‘Happy Day’, in 2010, the band split up due to its low media exposure and popularity.30 Both of the group’s members had been well-­known as local lesbian celebrities long before they became reality television celebrities. Yet, they have never publicly come out or confirmed any of the lesbian rumours.31 In 2013, Zhang played an explicitly butch leading role in the first Chinese web television girls’ love-­themed drama, Them (directed by Wang Liying).32

Figure 12.2 A screen capture of the band Acrush performing at the concert ‘Husband Exhibition’ in March 2017.

The emerging ‘national husband’   221

Figure 12.3 A screen capture of Acrush’s fan-made Weibo page in June 2017.

Unlike the active participation of V2 members in lesbian-­related media and events, Acrush members have never self-­revealed or been allowed by their company to discuss their sexual orientation in public (Huang 2017). Even so, Acrush members are so obviously tomboy lesbians to some fans that they have even written love letters to solicit their idols’ love. Yet, while Acrush acknowledges the existence of these love letters, the members insist that they will not love their fans in a romantic way but will instead show gratitude to their enthusiastic, predominantly female fans (Haas 2017; Huang 2017). Meanwhile, in 2017, in response to the large-­scale (also largely homophobic) anti-­fandom online, which dismisses Acrush members’ tomboyish looks, the head of Acrush’s company made the following comment: ‘There’s prejudice, and some people think because of their [Acrush members’] style then they are homosexual, and use that to criticize the band’ (Haas 2017). These subtle framings, performances, and promotions of Acrush’s androgynous personas, although constantly drawing on lesbian-­related tomboy cultures, ultimately do little other than distance Acrush from real-­life tomboy lesbians. These strategic efforts contributed to the greater media and public attention given to Acrush in 2017. However, they also disclose a disappointing and phobic viewpoint that again attaches homosexuality to a denigrating identity while celebrating female masculinity and queer female love as either fictional or the expression of feminism. Less than one year after the band’s debut, public interest in the band had waned. This was, in part, due to Acrush’s lack of publicity. By September 2017, the band had only released two singles and two cover songs. In fact, since its debut media commentators have questioned the band’s superficial flaunting of itself as feminist and ‘gender free’, as well as its ‘fake’ popularity that heavily relied on fan economy.33 In October 2017, Acrush’s once popular fan-­made Weibo page was no longer updated. By February 2018, two members had quit

222   Jamie J. Zhao the band. In June 2018, Acrush was reformed with two new members and renamed FANXYRED. The new band was signed by a South Korean-­based agent company, TOV. Yet, by July 2018, FANXYRED’s new Weibo page had only attracted around 156,000 followers. The short-­lived popularity of the tomboy group in China contrasts starkly with the sustained popularity of the aforementioned other two female ‘national husbands’ with feminine looks who have been continually embraced by the media industry and fans. It testifies to the ‘no future’, unsurvivable reality for Chinese tomboys both on and off screen (Martin 2010, p. 7).

Conclusion The emergence and popularity of ‘national husband’ figures have been inextricably entangled with both local historical meanings of love and inter-­Asian, cross-­regional and global pop cultural flows. This female-­centred queer imaginary disrupts the monogamous familial–marital system and related gender ideals institutionalized in contemporary China. At the same time, it tactically dis-­ identifies itself from LGBT identity politics of the real world. By so doing, the imaginary capitalizes on the omnipresent non-­normative potential, desires and articulations of media producers, performers and consumers with diverse gender, sexual and sociocultural identities and interests. It dismantles, yet also recomposes, the dominant sex–gender structure, in the process exposing the ways in which queer desires and normative ideals of gender and sexuality are mutually constitutive. It is this multilayered relationality between (hetero)normativity and queerness within real-­life situations that initiates, negotiates and compromises existing forms of queer imaginary surrounding love and intimacy in post-­2010 Chinese media and celebrity industries. This chapter has captured the multi-­dimensionality and complexity of this queer pop imaginary. In diverse ways, the cases illustrate how the non-­ heterosexual desires and gender identities that have been silenced and marginalized in the real world are projected onto mainstream media and cultural imaginaries. The shared ‘de-­politicizing’ tendency can also be interpreted as a coping and survival skill in a heteronormative culture. The spaces and possibilities opened up by this compromising gesture enable fans and media consumers in general to support, elaborate and celebrate queer forms of love in their own ways. Nevertheless, this social-­political promise of the ‘national husband’ imaginary is often clouded by official interventions, especially when in cyberspace the queer connotations are amplified and made to appear as straightforward as homosexual romance. Furthermore, the real-­life situations and struggles of certain gender and sexual minorities are inevitably replicated in these queer fantasies. For instance, the survival and popularity of the two national husbands with real-­life feminine gender identities (as well as explicitly self-­proclaimed heterosexuality) in the entertainment industries form a sharp contrast to the tomboy band’s transitory fame, narrow niche audience and limited marketability and business opportunities in China. This contrast repeats what happens in a

The emerging ‘national husband’   223 normative society where gender non-­normative women eventually become ‘unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies’ (Butler 1993, p.  3). Additionally, the contradictory employment of feminism to ‘de-­politicize’ female gender non-­ normativity by the tomboyish band also cautions against a conflation of LGBT, queer and feminist cultural practices and politics, even during scholarly inquiries of the queerest dimension of Chinese entertainment industries.

Notes   1 See https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%8E%8B%E5%81%A5%E6%9E%97/1065126.   2 Wang Sicong was born in Mainland China in 1988. Since his primary school years he has lived in Singapore and the UK where he was educated at world-­renowned private schools. He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from University College London, which signifies—to himself and to his fans—his high social status, elegant taste and high intelligence. See www.sohu.com/a/7378760_107743.   3 It has been rumoured that Wang prefers to have beautiful actors as his gigolos. Yet, during media interviews, he has also been quite ambiguous on questions about his self-­proclaimed bisexuality. He sometimes also denies these homosexual rumours about himself in public.   4 See the online commentary from the People’s Daily at: http://bbs1.people.com.cn/ post/2/1/2/167096313.html   5 See www.whatsonweibo.com/weibo-­administration-were-­no-longer-­targeting-gay-­ content/.   6 See https://medium.com/shanghaiist/two-­women-beaten-­by-security-­guards-in-­beijings798-art-­district-for-­wearing-rainbow-­badges-668c8c16201.   7 See www.douban.com/group/topic/32499448/.   8 Soon after the post was heatedly discussed online, the author deleted the pictures and the post. Yet, many netizens saved and reposted the original post on other sites.   9 For instance, the celebrity in the pictures posted by the author looks almost exactly the same as Kuo, who was also living in Toronto, Canada, during the period described in the post. 10 Gao yanzhi is a Chinese cyber-­neologism that means people ‘of high value in terms of the index of appearance’ (Gong and Yang 2017, p.  107). For some of the fans’ responses, see www.douban.com/group/topic/41616730/. 11 See www.douban.com/group/topic/41616730/. 12 See www.douban.com/group/topic/87603036/. 13 See www.douban.com/group/topic/41550297/. 14 Cis-­gender refers to people whose self-­identified gender matches their biological sex. 15 For a detailed discussion of girls’ schools as a female homosocial environment in Chinese pop culture, see Martin 2010. 16 See www.bilibili.com/video/av7506732/. 17 See https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%BD%AD%E5%AE%A5%E7%BA%B6. 18 See www.chinadaily.com.cn/interface/zaker/1142843/2016–01–22/cd_23208378.html. 19 See http://ent.ifeng.com/a/20160111/42560072_0.shtml. 20 Later, the director deleted this post. A follower’s screen capture of the post is online at www.zhihu.com/question/39529133. 21 See http://dy.163.com/wemedia/article/detail/BCLQ89TB05178OMV.html. 22 See www.gzhphb.com/article/12/122814.html. 23 See http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-­funinfo-6798453–1.shtml. 24 See www.chinadaily.com.cn/interface/yidian/1083961/2016–01–22/cd_23195588.html. 25 The androgynous style of the band members was also translated as unisex/neutro sexual/zhongxing in some English-­language media coverage.

224   Jamie J. Zhao 26 See www.kpopmap.com/ffc-­acrush-kpop-­profile/. 27 Acrush’s style might have reminded some viewers of the Taiwanese transgender music group MissTer, which debuted in 2011. Yet the greatest differences between the two tomboy bands are that MissTer was organized and led by the openly out ­Taiwanese lesbian celebrity Jin Dai, and that the selection of the members of MissTer was carried out in a lesbian bar in Taipei. For more information about MissTer, see Hu 2017. 28 See www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/30/the-­female-husbands-­boyband-of-­girlswin-­hearts-china-­acrush. 29 See http://emo.8do.org/feeling/2017/04/28/25602.html. 30 See https://baike.baidu.com/item/V2%E7%BB%84%E5%90%88. 31 Both of the group members became famous in the Chinese music industry for their participation in the Chinese reality TV singing competition Super Girl. This show has been notorious for its blatant high-­profiling of female masculinity and same-­sex intimacy as special kinds of ‘sisterhood’ or ‘female friendship’. Yet, one of the group members, Fu Jing, was ranked as one of the most famous and handsome tomboy lesbians in her hometown, Tianjin, long before she became famous for her participation in the show in 2006 and the debut of V2 in 2010. 32 See https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A5%B9%E4%BB%AC/15416052. 33 For public doubt about Acrush’s sudden popularity in 2017, see https://zhuanlan. zhihu.com/p/26282483.

References Bachner, Andrea. 2014. ‘Queer Affiliations: Mak Yan Yan’s Butterfly as Sinophone Romance’. In: Queer Sinophone Cultures, edited by Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich. New York: Routledge, pp. 201–220. BBC. 2017. ‘Chinese Boy Band FFC-­Acrush is Made Up of Women’, 30 March. www. bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/39440463/chinese-­boy-band-­ffc-acrush-­reveal-theyre-­ actually-women. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge. Ellis-­Petersen, Hannah. 2016. ‘China Bans Depictions of Gay People on Television’, Guardian, 4 March. www.theguardian.com/tv-­and-radio/2016/mar/04/china-­bans-gay-­ people-television-­clampdown-xi-­jinping-censorship. Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. 2014. Queer Women in Urban China. New York: Routledge. Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. and Schroeder, William F. (eds.). 2015. Queer/Tongzhi China. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Feng, Jiayun. 2018. ‘Internal Memo Reveals Tighter Regulations on Chinese Films and Television Dramas’, Sup China, 12 June. https://supchina.com/2018/06/12/internal-­ memo-reveals-­tighter-regulations-­on-chinese-­films-and-­television-dramas/. Feng, Jin. 2013. Romancing the Internet. Boston, MA: Brill. Gong, Haomin and Yang, Xin. 2017. Reconfiguring Class, Gender, Ethnicity and Ethics in Chinese Internet Culture. New York: Routledge. Grant, Beata. 2009. Eminent Nuns. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Guo, Jie. 2013. ‘From Patriarchal Polygamy to Conjugal Monogamy: Imagining Male Same-­Sex Relationships in Modern China’. MCLC 25 (1): 165–205. Guo, Shaohua. 2017. ‘When Dating Shows Encounter State Censors: A Case Study of If You Are the One’. Media, Culture & Society, 39 (4): 487–503. Haas, Benjamin. 2017. ‘Acrush: The Boyband of Girls Winning Hearts in China’, Guardian, 30 April. www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/30/the-­female-husbands-­ boyband-of-­girls-win-­hearts-china-­acrush.

The emerging ‘national husband’   225 Halperin, David. 2003. ‘The Normalization of Queer Theory’. Journal of Homosexuality 45 (2/3/4): 339–343. Hu, Yu-­Ying. 2017. ‘Mainstreaming Female Masculinity, Signifying Lesbian Visibility: The Rise of the Zhongxing Phenomenon in Transnational Taiwan’. Sexualities 22 (1–2): 182–202. Huang, Zheping. 2017. ‘China’s Hottest New Boy Band is Actually Made up of Five Androgynous Girls’, Quartz, 30 March. https://qz.com/944691/ffc-­acrush-chinas-­ hottest-new-­boy-band-­is-actually-­made-up-­of-five-­androgynous-girls/. Jia, Lianrui and Zhou, Tianyang. 2015. ‘Regulation of Homosexuality in the Chinese Media Scene’, IAPS, 28 July. https://cpianalysis.org/2015/07/28/regulation-­ofhomosexuality-­in-the-­chinese-media-­scene/. Jung, Sun. 2009. ‘The Shared Imagination of Bishonen, Pan-­East Asian Soft Masculinity: Reading DBSK, Youtube.com and Transcultural New Media Consumption’, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 20 (April). http://intersections.anu. edu.au/issue20/jung.htm. Kuo, Lily. 2018. ‘China’s Weibo Reverses Ban on “Homosexual” Content After Outcry’, Guardian, 16 April. www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/16/china-­weibo-bans-­ homosexual-content-­protest. Lee, Haiyan. 2007. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Li, Luzhou. 2015. ‘If You Are the One: Dating Shows and Feminist Politics in Contemporary China’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (5): 519–535. Liu, Ya. 2017. ‘Ernai Ah Zhen’. In: Media and Society in Networked China, edited by Jack Qiu. Leiden: Brill, pp. 165–194. Louie, Kam. 2012. ‘Popular Culture and Masculinity Ideals in East Asia, with Special Reference to China’. Journal of Asian Studies 71 (4): 929–943. Martin, Fran. 2010. Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rocha, Leon. 2010. ‘Xing: The Discourse of Sex and Human Nature in Modern China’. Gender & History 22 (3): 603–628. Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sang, Tze-­Lan. 2003. The Emerging Lesbian. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shaw, Gareth and Zhang, Xiaoling. 2017. ‘Cyberspace and Gay Rights in a Digital China: Queer Documentary Filmmaking under State Censorship’. China Information 32 (2): 270–292. Xiao, Hui. 2010. ‘ “Love is a Capacity”: The Narrative of Gendered Self-­Development in Chinese-­Style Divorce’. Journal of Contemporary China 19 (66): 735–753. Zhao, Jamie J. 2017. ‘Acrush: A Case Study in Chinese Gender-­Neutrality’, IAPS, 28 June. https://iapsdialogue.org/2017/06/28/acrush-­a-case-­study-in-­chinese-gender-­neutrality/. Zhao, Jamie J. 2018a. ‘Censoring “Rainbow” in China’, IAPS, 1 June. http://theasia dialogue.com/2018/06/01/censoring-­rainbow-in-­china/. Zhao, Jamie J. 2018b. ‘The Ebb and Flow of Female Homoeroticism in the Online Chinese Queer Fandom of the 2006 Super Voice Girl’. Journal of Fandom Studies 6 (1): 33–45. Zhao, Jing Jamie, Yang, Ling and Lavin, Maud. 2017. ‘Introduction’. In: Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, edited by Maud Lavin, Ling Yang and Jing Jamie Zhao. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. xi–xxxiii. Zurndorfer, Harriet. 2016. ‘Polygamy and Masculinity in China’. In: Changing Chinese ­Masculinities, edited by Kam Louie. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 13–33.

13 ‘Revolution plus love?’ Online fandom of the television drama series The Disguiser Xiqing Zheng

The Disguiser (weizhuang zhe 伪装者, 2015), an espionage drama series with elements of action, family melodrama and bildungsroman, was a surprise hit in the Chinese television market. Adapted from the novel Spy War on Shanghai Bond (diezhan shanghaitan 谍战上海滩) by Zhang Yong, the series features the development of a reckless young man, Ming Tai, from spoiled rascal of a rich merchant family into Communist fighter for national salvation in Japanese-­ occupied Shanghai in 1939. The series’ popularity is due in part to its relatively superior production quality compared to many other contemporary ‘anti-­ Japanese war dramas’, but the show has also proven to be particularly popular among Chinese danmei fan girls, that is, fans who are devoted to male same-­sex romance. These fans have created a large number of homoerotic stories about Ming Tai’s two adopted elder brothers, Ming Lou and Ming Cheng, both adults and seasoned agents when the story starts. In July 2016, Lofter, one of the largest publication and information exchange platforms for Chinese fanfiction, started a billboard that calculated and ranked the popularity of fandoms published on its website. The coupling of Ming Lou/Ming Cheng (in Chinese, 楼诚, referred to as Lou/Cheng below), stayed at the top of the list for almost an entire year, until May 2017. This indicates a peculiarly long-­lasting enthusiasm among fan girls for this pairing, considering that in most cases the popularity of any fandom typically declines rapidly once the original media product ceases to be broadcast.1 The craze for anti-­Japanese war dramas in China in the 2000s and 2010s was partly the result of the extreme content control exerted by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT).2 This government agency issued a series of bans that restricted the themes permissible in television dramas. For example, a 2013 regulation dictated that for each television network, television series with pre-­modern settings were not allowed to exceed 15 per cent of all television series broadcast per year.3 As a comparatively politically secure theme that still allows the depiction of action and violence, anti-­Japanese war drama joins the earlier resurgence of the ‘Red Classics’ remakes and adaptations.4 Such dramas offer a narrative structure that stresses the historical success and legitimacy of communist rule. While Chinese mainstream media texts tend to portray the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as an

‘Revolution plus love?’   227 anti-­Japanese nationalist party instead of a proletariat party, fan writings about The Disguiser laud the Ming brothers as idealists of communism and discuss topics largely forgotten in the post-­socialist era, such as class politics, revolution and internationalism. Writing within online fandom also empowers fans to question the often taken-­for-granted official narratives of the revolutionary past and search for an alternative imagining of communist revolutionaries in post-­socialist China. Although the ultimate goal of Lou/Cheng stories is to explore interpersonal relationships and intimacy, rather than to rewrite political history, by intertwining homosexuality and communism, these stories reinforce the sincerity and grandeur of both revolution and love; they express, in the process, a queer love that is significantly different from the apolitical heterosexual romance prevalent in commercial media. In her comprehensive study of online romance in contemporary China, Jin Feng (2013) offers a ‘short genealogy’ of ‘romantic stories with Chinese characteristics’. She starts with traditional folk tales and the pre-­modern ‘scholar and beauty fiction’ (Feng 2013, pp 17–18).5 Jin Feng dwells briefly on the ‘Mandarin Duck and Butterfly’ school in the Republican era and comments on the absence of ‘free love’ in Chinese marriages since 1949. She then jumps directly to Qiong Yao, a Taiwanese novelist and the ‘Queen of Popular Romance’ (Feng 2013, p.  49), skipping the entirety of left-­wing writings about romance in modern Chinese literature, as if they had no repercussions in today’s China. Indeed, as Feng implies, current online romantic writings have clearly set themselves apart from the typical socialist narrative about romantic love in terms of narrative logic and the structure of feeling. Online romantic writings overt emphasis on personal happiness and well-­being directly contradicts the overall exhortation to collective values and class consciousness in socialist narratives. Since consumer capitalism is taken for granted by the general audience in post-­socialist China as a universal and desirable value in women’s imagination of an ideal life, many heterosexual romance stories foreground the financial capability of male partners. Novels that depict an overbearing CEO who falls in love with an ordinary girl, a contemporary variation of the Cinderella romance, have dominated women-­oriented internet literature. Lou/Cheng fanfictions, however, represent a counter-­current to this prevailing trend of commodifying and privatizing romantic love and express a growing discontent with the neoliberal process in post-­socialist China. By centring on male same-­sex love, Lou/ Cheng fanfictions also showcase the popularity of non-­normative imaginings and fantasies in contemporary China (see Chapter 12, this volume). Yet, unlike the more commercialized queer narratives, fanfiction writers have politicized the queer love in Lou/Cheng stories, re-­envisioning the history of communism in China. As a form of non-­commercialized fan practice, Lou/Cheng stories and the community building around them resemble the ‘ethical practice’ of anti-­Qiong Yao fan writings discussed by Yi Zhou (Chapter 4). Freed from the pressure to make a profit, fanfiction writers are able to articulate non-­normative fantasies, experiment with unconventional themes and challenge the basic ideological assumptions of mainstream society.

228   Xiqing Zheng Like Zhao (Chapter 12), I am interested in understanding the meaning of female fantasies expressed online but in my discussion I situate the Lou/Cheng fanfictions in the long lineage of the ‘revolution-­plus-love’ (geming jia lian’ai 革命加恋爱) formula, a narrative pattern that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. I first explain the historical meaning and function of this formula, and follow this with a textual analysis of two representative Lou/Cheng stories. Specifically, I examine how these stories delve into the narrative fissures as well as the intense homosexual subtext in the original media text to excavate an authentic experience of life for the characters in the 1920s and 1930s. I also explore how the stories strive to restore meaning to the empty signifier of ‘revolution’ in a post-­ revolution era, and how they raise new questions about the issue of gender in the revolution-­plus-love formula by replacing the heterosexual romance in the original formula with a homosexual one. At the same time, I also demonstrate how the neoliberal social environment restricts fan writers’ imaginings of the Cold War era. In conclusion, I argue that the intertwined relationship between communist revolution and homosexual love opens up a new position outside the dualism of heterosexual romance and revolution, combining revolution and love into a shared utopia of equality that partly survives even in the texts with a neoliberal logic. To clarify my terminology, I use the term ‘post-­socialist’ to refer to ‘a global, universally shared condition’ that ‘with the collapse of the “alternative modernity” of communism, inexorably returns us to the “singular modernity” that is, in the final analysis, synonymous with capitalism’ (McGrath 2008, p.  14). In other words, by ‘post-­socialist China’ I refer to an economic and cultural condition, rather than a terminal period, which differs from my usage of ‘post-­Mao’, which strictly signifies the era after Mao’s death.

What is ‘revolution-­plus-love’? The Disguiser is not a typical fictional narrative that resonates with the socialist ‘Red Classics’. Neither is it critically acclaimed enough to surpass some of the earlier espionage dramas, such as Undercover (qianfu 潜伏, 2008), produced during the spy drama craze in the late 2000s. But it is similar to both in that it attempts to combine the development of the protagonist with both revolution and love. Its plotline features a poorly contextualized and clichéd romance subplot that centres on the hero, Ming Tai. The producers design a classical revolution-­ plus-love situation, in which Ming Tai’s political choices coincide with his choice of lovers. His ‘life and death partner’ in the Nationalist Party (the KMT) is Yu Manli, a victim of domestic abuse and a former prostitute and prisoner. She loves him wholeheartedly, while he loves a communist agent, who is an educated nurse and unenthusiastic lover. After Yu Manli sacrifices herself during a mission, Ming Tai is presumed to go on to marry his communist fiancée and lead a revolutionary life with her. However, because of an unsuccessful casting choice and an unconvincing characterization, this female communist, Cheng Jingyun, does not present as a lovable character. The unsuccessful romantic

‘Revolution plus love?’   229 p­ lotline stops halfway through, with neither female character playing any significant role in the final crisis of the story, leaving space for more family melodrama and the homosocial bonding between Ming Tai’s two adopted brothers—a homosexual couple, according to the fans’ interpretation. Loosely based on legendary communist spy Yuan Shu (袁殊), who served five different political and social cliques in Shanghai during the Sino-­Japanese war, the character of Ming Lou in The Disguiser is depicted as a charismatic intellectual born into a wealthy merchant family in Shanghai. After receiving higher education in France, Ming Lou returns to Shanghai in late 1939 to accept a puppet position in Wang Jingwei’s Nanjing Nationalist Government, serving simultaneously as an undercover agent for secret agencies of both the KMT and the CCP. Ming Cheng is Ming Lou’s adopted brother, rescued by Ming Lou from an abusive foster mother. Cheng attended college in France and then spent time at the M.V. Frunze Military Academy in Russia for military training. Both Lou and Cheng are handsome, with charismatic manners and superhero-­like abilities, all of which attract many fans. In contrast to Ming Tai’s role in the clichéd heterosexual revolution-­plus-love story, fans’ comments indicate that the Lou/Cheng narrative presents a much more complicated and intriguing variation on the revolution-­plus-love formula. Revolution-­plus-love (geming jia lian’ai 革命加恋爱) was originally a derogative term, ascribed by a group of 1930s Leftist critics to technically and artistically crude and ideologically bourgeois fiction by Leftist writers in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and represented by Jiang Guangci. Later scholars tend to understand the term less restrictively, tracing it back to the literary tradition of ‘ernü yingxiong’ (儿女英雄, literally, romantic love and heroes) started by late Qing writers and further developed in the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly school’s writings. Socialist realist writings including, most famously, Yang Mo’s novel Song of Youth, are also seen as part of this tradition (He 2006; Lee 2007; Liu 2003; Wang 1997). However, revolution-­plus-love tends to function more as a writing formula than a genre, as it takes various forms in fictional writings. For this reason, it is difficult to summarize a strict genealogy. Since political radicalization was a common condition of twentieth-­century Chinese literature, two types of struggle battle throughout the twentieth century: romantic love as the epitome of personal freedom, and political revolution as a form of broad national and international human emancipation. The negotiation between these two forces represents the social conception of modernization. To understand how the Lou/Cheng stories are involved in the revolution-­pluslove writing formula, it is necessary for us to return to the formula’s early stages. To simplify the investigation, I refer principally to 1930s Leftist writings and 1950s–1960s Red Classics—the two periods when the theme of revolution was most prominent—as comparisons for the Lou/Cheng fanfictions. The original revolution-­plus-love theme relates to a particular literary field of the late 1920s and early 1930s in urban Shanghai. This era was characterized by the lingering influence of early May Fourth literature’s emphasis on individualism, the KMT government’s recent massacre of the communists and the eagerness and commitment

230   Xiqing Zheng of intellectuals for revolution.6 In her account of Leftist writers around this ­particular period, Jianmei Liu (2003, p.  18) maintains that Leftist writers ‘were fascinated with this formulaic writing because it provided a perfect site to linger on the dilemmas and contradictions that epitomized their tormented experience’. Mao Dun, a leftist critic in the 1930s, famously delineates the path of development for the formula. First came ‘the conflict between the revolutionary cause and the romantic drive’ that ends with ‘a call to relinquish love for the sake of revolution’. Then there was ‘the reciprocation formula’, in which ‘revolution served as an incentive bringing forth true romantic feelings between the revolutionaries’. Finally, the ‘reciprocation’ formula ‘saw love emanating from the comradeship and compassion of the revolutionaries’ (quoted in Liu 2003, p. 53). However, as He (2006, pp.  72–73) points out, while Mao Dun’s interpretation seems to provide an evolutionary path for the formula, the evolution is hypothetical, serving more as advocacy, rather than describing a historical fact. The first ‘stage’ of this formula has provided the dominant writing pattern for revolution-­plus-love stories, i.e. revolution and love are treated as mutually exclusive in most of the writings. Haiyan Lee (2007, p. 260) observes that in the Leftist writings (and, ironically, in the writings of the Nationalist propagandists too) of the 1930s, love is stripped of its potential for transcendence, so that ‘instead of inspiring noble acts of devotion and sacrifice and ushering young people onto the path of progress, love leads them to the dead end of history’. Lee (2007, p. 280) argues that even in the narrative pattern that Mao Dun approves of, i.e. the reciprocation formula in which love and revolution seem to coexist peacefully, ‘love can be tolerated as a necessary fact of life’ as long as revolution is prioritized. It would be appropriate to claim that in the 1930s writings that are categorized as revolution-­plus-love, revolution is only able to prevail at the precise moment that love, as the antithesis of revolution, is denied. The logic in such a formula (or in all three formulae summarized by Mao Dun), then, comes from the presumed sublime authority of revolution and its power to overshadow and harness individual romantic sentiments, which was the key in earlier May Fourth literature. Literary critic Ban Wang (1997, pp. 124–125), in his discussion of the films Song of Youth (1959) and Nie Er (1959), suggests that in Maoist cinema, the individual’s libidinal energy is assimilated and sublimated into revolutionary and nationalistic goals without displacing the individual’s sexual love or desire. Wang points out that in the case of Lin Daojing, the protagonist in Song of Youth, sexual desire is manifested through her political choices, as these choices become personified in the male characters she chooses as her lovers. While Wang discusses cultural texts produced much later than the 1930s, a similar dynamic prevails: love has to combine with or succumb to revolution in order to become a sublime emotion for the protagonist. Lou and Cheng are presented as contemporaries of the young Leftist writers in Shanghai who initiated the revolution-­plus-love stories. They also share with these writers a clear self-­identification as intellectuals. Lou and Cheng’s characterizations bring back the archetypal romantic subject of early twentieth-­century

‘Revolution plus love?’   231 Chinese literature: petit bourgeois intellectuals in the post-­socialist era. Later writings in the 1930s tended to question romantic love as a form of class-­ specific privilege, a frivolous and self-­centred indulgence. Besides, the need to become true proletariats and abandon one’s petit bourgeois sentiments was an issue that haunted Leftist literature of the Republican era, as well as Chinese literature of the entire Maoist era. The sincere attempt to become true proletariats, however, has disappeared from the post-­socialist imagination of the revolutionary past. Especially in espionage television series, communist undercover agents often come from bourgeois families—for example, Yu Zecheng in Undercover, Yang brothers in Imminent Crisis (Yichujifa一触即发, 2012), Fang Meng’ao in All Quiet in Peking (Beiping wu zhanshi 北平无战事, 2015). By downplaying class narratives, these shows obscure part of the most violent and ruthless past of the communist revolution and play perfectly into the post-­ socialist commercialist mentality and the re-­established social classes. Petit-­ bourgeois intellectuals, with their educated and polished lifestyle, become the attractive protagonists. However, underneath the glossy representation of the extravagant lives of the wealthy few in the Republican era, the old question remains: How should Leftist intellectuals understand and negotiate their position in a communist revolution? In the case of the Lou/Cheng fandom, the fans probe the narrative crevices of a commercial entertainment text for their own expression of revolution and love.

Revolution: communism as a restored signifier As is widely recognized in recent scholarship on the rise of nationalistic sentiments in China, in the post-­Mao era the ruling CCP has shifted its role from a class-­based party to a nationalist party. Nationalism has therefore become a powerful discourse used to legitimate party rule. Christopher Hughes examines the revised 1982 Chinese Constitution’s reference to building ‘a socialist spiritual civilization’ and notes that: [after the Maoist era] although ‘communism’ still figured in this formula [of socialist spiritual civilization], its meaning had become so diluted that it had come to signify not much more than a kind of patriotic selflessness characteristic of a past era. (Hughes 2006, p. 18) Similarly, Kang Liu (2004, p. 30) suggests that: ‘[t]he integration of Marxism with nationalism that characterizes Mao’s Marxism is conditioned by the historical task of revolution, with its radical reinvention of a “national culture” sundered from Confucian and other traditional values.’ Both scholars imply that since the Maoist era communism with ‘Chinese characteristics’ has successfully integrated nationalism. Communists in the revolutionary era faced the tasks of ending imperialist invasions and the exploitation of the Chinese people by foreign bourgeoisie. Although the communist

232   Xiqing Zheng utopia is now subservient to economic success, which has widely been acknowledged as the priority of the whole society during the 1990s, the CCP is still the ruling party, and the socialist ideal remains the official ideology. Both official and popular discourses conspire to underscore nationalism in the revolutionary era as a debatable synonym for communism. Such a substitution also affects representations of the Maoist past. Because Maoist memories are filtered through the failure of the global communist movement, the collapse and dishonour of the socialist clique and an ever-­present doubt cast by the socio-­political turmoil in socialist China, such a situation further forces the constantly functional nationalist value to the forefront, transforming communist ideology into another aspect of state nationalism. This ideological shift in communist revolutionary memory is most clearly demonstrated through adaptations of Red Classics after the 1990s. Through an analysis of the historical backgrounds of Red Classics, Kang Liu (2010) identifies these works as part of the CCP’s attempt to establish hegemony. These literary and media products helped to create ‘a language, or a discursive system that aims to provide a cohesive, and affective ideology for the revolution and alternative modernity’ (Liu 2010, p.  334). However, Liu argues (2010, p.  330) that when these novels, plays and films experienced a resurgence from the 1990s, the ‘ideological meaning of the Red Classics, or their “signified,” is almost completely hollowed out’. While the Red Classics, as the ‘residual’ elements in the political arena, capture or elicit emotional responses from those with personal experience during the Maoist era, they have also been appropriated by the culturally ‘dominant’ and exemplify the complexity of current post-­socialist Chinese society. In the current cultural environment, the term ‘Red Classics’ assumes a paradoxical signification, as it refers both to a hegemonic discourse in memory and to an ideologically empty sign of nostalgia, an emotionally and aesthetically pleasing commodity. Although completely different in their original cultural background of production and circulation, The Disguiser and the Red Classics remakes are comparable in their intentional alienation from the Maoist ideological messages and mode of emotional expression. Such a filtering process involves removing the rhetoric of class struggle and refocusing on the nationalist narrative. Qian Gong (2017) observes in her analysis of a Red Classics remake, The Red Sister-­inLaw, that the scriptwriter deliberately focuses on the Sino-­Japanese war to emphasize the united front against the invasion, with all classes gathering under its banner, substituting a local Confucian ethic for class consciousness. Similarly, the story of The Disguiser is set in the Sino-­Japanese war, completely circumventing the issues of class struggle and the ideological conflicts between the Communists and the Nationalists—both depicted favourably as having cooperated in defending the national interest. The protagonist Ming Tai only becomes disillusioned with the KMT when he discovers that his operational base station is involved in smuggling opium. This ugly fact, along with his miraculous discovery that an older communist agent is his biological father, push him towards the communist ideology—a bizarre combination of an anti-­corruption propaganda and Confucian filial duty.

‘Revolution plus love?’   233 In sum, in both Red Classics remakes and new shows such as The Disguiser, the emptied signifier of communism serves to legitimate the CCP as a revolutionary force in history and to reinforce its current position as the ruling party. Even though the signifier is already completely hollowed out, the ever-­present signifier, as the remnant of the revolutionary past, always retains the possibility of signification being restored. Lou/Cheng fans are exceptional in their sincere and eager attempt to make use of this narrative disjuncture to investigate the connotations and signification of ‘communism’ for early generations of CCP members. As Henry Jenkins states, active fans’ ‘desire for continuity, consistency and completeness’ (2012, p. 106) determines that they read into the details of the original narrative and complement the original narrative to create a realistic and logical storyline and construct a believable background for the characters (Jenkins 2012, pp. 107–119). In the case of the Lou/Cheng stories, the dynamics between the emptied signifier of communism and the fannish desire for narrative coherence bring the communist ideology under scrutiny, and then into further elaboration. In this way, fans insert the communist revolution and the international communist movement into the picture. ‘Repaying back to one’s nation’, Ming Lou’s motto in the original television series, is not questioned but is supplemented with the dream of building a communist society, an independent China for all people, a dream that he is willing to die for. With their historical knowledge, research and especially family oral history, a number of Lou/Cheng writers have succeeded in restoring a convincing social and personal background to the characters. One of the most famous fanfictions in the fandom, Mockmockmock’s (spinario 2018) Jusqu’à ce Qu’on se Revoit is a typical example.7 Constructed in an episodic manner, the story imagines slices of life of the Ming brothers, describing in detail the process through which they devote themselves to the communist faith during their experiences in Nanjing in 1927 (Nationalist massacre of the communists), Munich in 1933 (Nazi book-­burning campaign), Leningrad in 1935 (Seventh Congress of the Communist International) and Granada in 1936 (Spanish Civil War), etc. These specific times and places serve as (fictional) testimonies that efficiently and powerfully bring back the memory of an important group of Chinese communists who consolidated their Marxist identities during their study in Europe (most notably, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, who studied in France as worker–students in the 1920s). These back stories also recreate a history of the international communist movement, largely forgotten in the post-­Cold War world. Quite different from many other fan writers, Mockmockmock insists on an alternative imagination of the world order while still critiquing political movements in the People’s Republic of China. She never lets the characters adopt Maoist class rhetoric, and therefore stays away from a Maoist revolutionary vision. But, on the other hand, she refuses to succumb to the neoliberal world order, by imagining the characters after the 1950s working in the United Nations, an organization that until today still represents, at least nominally, the idealism of bringing justice and peace to the world. The story also relocates the interpretation of communism to

234   Xiqing Zheng every ordinary communist, instead of the communist regime. It treats communism as a personal faith, an aspiration for equality and salvation. The writer captures this in the following quotation, given to Ming Lou: Having said this, Ming Lou held out his hand and patted Ming Cheng on his cheek—he had done it … numerous times; whenever his brother needed comfort or encouragement, he never begrudged any possible warmth that he could offer. He let a new smile show on his face, saying in almost whispering voice: ‘I’ve always believed, that any ‘ism’, if it doesn’t allow people to love it in each of their different ways, then it does not deserve anyone’s love.’ (spinario 2018, Chapter 4) Steadfast communist faith thus becomes invincible, even in a world in which communism no longer holds the status of a legitimate utopia. I do not claim that the iconography of communism was completely absent from Chinese fanfiction writings until The Disguiser fandom emerged. On the contrary, communism often carries the signification of a national identity for modern and contemporary China in a small but observable portion of online fictional writings. A typical example is Chinese fanfictions of the Japanese anime Axis Powers: Hetalia (henceforth, APH), in which fans deal with modern and contemporary international governmental relationships, using anthropomorphized characters for nations, playing out collaborations and conflicts among countries and regions. In Chinese APH fandom, the ‘shipping’, (the act of imagining the romantic relationship between two characters) of the characters of China and Russia (or, rather, the history of the USSR) has been popular, and communism plays a significant role in presenting the drama between the two countries. However, the presentation of communist ideals in these fanfictions often results in a simplified melodrama of the Cold War, in which socialism and capitalism are treated as value-­free slogans without historical background. A perfect example is a popular dōjinshi (amateurish publications created by fans, as they are called in Japanese), Pravda (Wanhong zhili 万红至理) that Ling Yang (2017) analyzes, in which communism features as an empty label without political or historical details, signifying the distinction between the two sides of the iron curtain. Even though both APH and Lou/Cheng fans appear to reinforce the hegemony of official communist ideology in current Chinese cultural and political society, they essentially take two different approaches and offer different responses to the same official narrative. Many APH fans imagine the narratives from the perspective of a nation-­state and embody the grand historical narrative dictated by the current communist regime by repeating and reproducing the rhetoric of clichéd state nationalism. By contrast, Lou/Cheng fans usually imagine and describe individuals in a grand history, seeking to recreate these legendary characters on an everyday level. In this way, the Lou/Cheng fans’ stories present much more complicated interpretations of the communist revolution.

‘Revolution plus love?’   235

Love: inevitable disillusion with communism? Adèle said, ‘My mother once asked, ‘Professor Ming, the whole of Paris is mad, why are you not mad? The whole of Paris is crying, why are you not crying? The whole of Paris is smiling, why are you not happy?’ Now I understand, that he did not need to. He had been through it all. (Lantheo 2016) While fan writers never question the legitimacy and necessity of Lou and Cheng’s devotion and sacrifice to the national salvation project during the Sino-­ Japanese war, they are much less certain about whether communist success is a desirable future for the two characters. Such psychology is clearly represented in one work of Lou/Cheng fanfiction, Reaching the Same Goal through Different Paths (shututonggui 殊途同归), written by Abu (阿不, 2015). In this story, after a secret mission succeeds in Shanghai, Cheng, assumed to have died after being fatally wounded, is miraculously reunited with Lou in New York. The pair begin to lead a happy-­ever-after life with their family, without any trace of their previous communist revolutionary life. Another story, Ought to Sing (Dang yi ge, 当以歌), written by Lantheo (2016), shifts conveniently from a realist narrative into a fragmented legend, as Lou and Cheng both vanish from the sight of their acquaintances around 1970. Their story before they vanished is told decades later by descendants of their acquaintances. According to the incomplete jigsaw puzzle, we know that in Lantheo’s fanfiction both Lou and Cheng travelled between Europe and China after the Sino-­Japanese war, still serving as agents for the CCP. The author implies that they both fake their deaths and plan to reunite in the United States in the early 1970s. The fact that their final stories are told orally by the younger generation creates an atmosphere of a premodern storytelling tradition. This narrative strategy may have been used because the author is reluctant to deal with or even face the endless chaos and violence of more recent social revolutions and movements, as they no longer hold sufficient aesthetic distance to make heroic legends survive. The author instead arbitrarily creates a legend by a restrictive narrative strategy, refusing a mundane and probably humiliating ending for the legendary characters. As Shuyu Kong (2012) notices in the online fandom of the popular Chinese espionage television series Undercover, most audience members are well aware of the historical trajectory of the CCP and modern Chinese history when they discuss the possible life trajectory of a fictional character. Furthermore, audiences use the tortuous experiences of famous real-­life secret agents during the Cultural Revolution to prove the ‘futility and uselessness of taking political beliefs too seriously’ (Kong 2012, pp.  18–19). In other words, Kong suggests that the utilitarian cynicism that results from affective investment in the characters might disjoint the fundamental ideological underpinning of the original narrative. As mentioned earlier, Ming Lou’s character is taken from the life story of a legendary communist agent, Yuan Shu, who was sentenced to prison in 1958

236   Xiqing Zheng during the Anti-­Rightness Campaign,8 only to be released after the Cultural Revolution was over in 1978. With this piece of extra-­textual information, fans also tend to read Ming Lou’s possible future in light of Yuan Shu’s tragic experience. As a result, allegiance towards the pro-­CCP ideological message of the original narrative strongly contradicts fans’ love for the characters. The only way to make the two loyal communists live happily ever after is to remove them from the chaotic political environment in socialist China. For these fans, if Lou and Cheng stay in China after the establishment of the People’s Republic, they will most probably become disillusioned with the communist regime and suffer due to the continuous political movements from the 1950s to the 1970s. Some fan writers even model their characters on the examples of the Chinese intellectuals who were tortured and killed in the Cultural Revolution, making these fictional characters suffer the most grotesque deaths. In the well-­received work of fanfiction Peach and Plum Blossoms in Spring Breeze (Taoli chunfeng 桃李春风), for instance, the author Helan (贺兰, 2015) details her imagined version of Ming Lou’s death scene: after the Cultural Revolution starts in 1966, he is beaten and killed in the lawless student riots. Accused of being a traitor and an enemy agent, his body is dissected and stuffed with straw (a death, as the author points out in her notes, suffered by the famous actress Yan Fengying in 1967). The Lou/Cheng stories set during the Cultural Revolution present a clear expectation of a temporal break in 1976—the year that signalled the end of the Cultural Revolution and a complete break with the previous revolutionary rhetoric. The use of this temporal break and the ‘expecting a bright future when suffering’ mentality make these stories strikingly similar to the Red Classics set in the ‘pre-­liberation’ era, i.e. those that describe the tortuous lives led by communist revolutionaries and lower-­class people before the CCP took over the government. This time around, the lawless mobs cruelly persecute sane, wise protagonists, who can only count on the end of the Cultural Revolution to restore the normal (sometimes prestigious) lives that they had led before it. The drastic contrast in the cultural environment, economic conditions and psychological movements before and after 1976 presented in the Lou/Cheng stories disrupts, to a degree, the attempt to relocate the communist ideology back into the emptied signifier of ‘revolution’, by questioning the CCP’s policies and legitimacy to rule. The tendency to depict the Maoist era as chaotic in contrast to a bright, free ‘reform and opening’ era after 1978, and to emphasize the importance of economic affluence and social stability, could be seen as complicit with the current government’s neoliberal agenda (Gao 2008, pp. 48–64, quoted in Braester 2016, p. 439). As the quotation at the beginning of this section shows, in casting the revolutionary past of the global 1960s in a negative light (in Lantheo’s case, May 1968 in Paris), fanfictions tend to equalize all revolutions after the 1930s (as Lantheo’s Ming Lou ‘has been through it all’ in China, he is unaffected by social events when he is in Paris in 1968). Fanfiction authors describe all revolutions through highly abstract images of chaos and violence that disrupt the status quo of the capitalist West, which is also the ‘normalcy’ that ‘abnormal’ socialist China will return to after 1976. In this way, these fictional narratives lose the

‘Revolution plus love?’   237 power to present specific details of the tragedy that happened in the Maoist era, and further destabilize their glorification of Lou and Cheng’s revolutionary past in the 1930s. When fan authors start to suspect the course and aim of the revolution, the once delegitimized individual sentiments in the revolution-­plus-love formula become the substance of fanfictions. When the faith in communism and revolution loses its legitimacy, the lovers become each other’s faith. When the characters’ faith in the communist revolution is deemed outdated and worthless, their actions in keeping such a faith replace the communist utopian vision. Moreover, ‘equality’, a quality that is essential to both ‘revolution’ and ‘love’, becomes one of the most important demonstrations of communist ideas in many fanfictions.

A third space: intertwined homosexual identity and communist faith In fact, he has already had an answer, from a long time ago. He used to be sad about his answer, as if it was a compromise he made for the sake of eroticism, but this answer is utterly unchangeable even under torture. The compromise turns into something similar to faith, as hard as steel. Perhaps that is because he has died once, eighteen years ago. He no longer recalls all the unbearable and humiliating memories of that child; he has a new shape, a new body, a new breath, independent and reasonable. But Ming Lou grows in his bones and blood. He is always his deepest love, his beginning and ending, his indulgence and redemption, his shackle and freedom. (Lian’ainao yu wutuobang, 2015) While the previous two sections have concentrated on discussing ‘revolution’, in this section I stress that no matter what position fanfiction authors take towards the history of the communist revolution, the Lou/Cheng fanfictions are written, read and circulated first and foremost for the sake of romantic love. Revolution is only the means to valorize the romantic subject. Elizabeth Woledge (2006) refers to fanfictions as ‘intimatopia’, in which the intimate relationships among characters take the place of sex (or libido), serving as the driving force of the plotline. Lou/Cheng fanfictions are no exception. ‘Ten Thousand Miles of Rivers’ (jianghe wanli 江河万里) is the most viewed and liked story in the Lou/ Cheng fandom on Lofter. The author’s pseudonym (‘Love-­Muddled-Head and Utopia’ (lian’ainao yu wutuobang 恋爱脑与乌托邦) captures the two key elements of the story and the general Lou/Cheng fandom: devotion to romantic stories between the two characters, and depiction of a utopia that motivates the characters in their communist revolutionary endeavours. The term ‘utopia’ refers not only to a perfect society but also to the queer characters’ ideal future: a utopian love relationship. As the quotation that opens this section shows, the complicated love that Cheng feels for Lou is impossible to classify; his personal history of being an abused child from a lower-­class family plays into both his

238   Xiqing Zheng admiration for his saviour Lou and his communist vision to free those who have been humiliated. His loyalty towards the communist vision becomes inseparable from his deep-­rooted faith in his brother and lover. Most significantly, in this fanfiction, Cheng subtly implies that he prioritizes romantic love over party discipline and the revolution. For Cheng, Lou is his ‘deepest love’, his ‘beginning and ending’, his ‘shackle and freedom’. The author further implies that Lou also prioritizes his lover, which underscores their equality. As the previous discussion has indicated, the revolution-­plus-love formula used to feature a binary relationship between revolution and love. Revolution, equivalent to the ‘masses’ or ‘the greater good’, was always prioritized, while love, which was equated with the ‘individual’, ‘the small self ’ and trivial feelings, was necessary but had to yield to the greater cause of the revolution. However, once the revolution signifier had gradually been emptied of ideological messages, revolution and love again seemed to converge in fictional texts such as The Disguiser. However, this time, revolution is still absent on a diegetic level. In other words, without concrete signification of the communist ideology and its manifestations, this espionage story full of spectacles and stunts becomes a story of a non-­revolutionary revolution, driven by individual sentiments, including romantic love. This raises the question of how the dynamic between revolution and love is different for Lou and Cheng when the fans imagine them as a homosexual couple. First and foremost, this queer version of revolution-­plus-love eliminates a major player in this literary formula: women. Almost all the texts using this formula deal with the issue of modern women—especially revolutionary women—either taking a woman’s perspective, discussing how revolution and love should compete in her life, or taking the perspective of men, turning women into symbols of sexual diversion or revolutionary devotion. All these literary interventions turn revolution-­plus-love stories into battlegrounds for the negotiation of women’s sexual identity and for their choices between public life and domesticity. Removing women from the formula leads to obvious changes, but two key elements still determine the basic dynamic and appearance of this romantic relationship: the power relationship between the two lovers, and the negotiation between their public and domestic lives. The Lou/Cheng narratives run quite contrary to many archetypal male bonding tropes examined in previous English language scholarship—such as the many male best friends that form a ‘sacred, symbolic marriage’ in nineteenth-­ century English language literature (Shelley 1986, p.  96, quoted in Woledge 2006, p. 101). Lou and Cheng come from completely different social classes and sustain a highly unequal relationship in the original narrative. Lou saves Cheng from his abusive mother by adoption, educates him and sends him to study abroad, but still keeps him as an assistant and servant. As the fan Qianyi Yu (2016) points out in her character analysis, when the novel is adapted as a television series Ming Cheng is elevated from the positions of chauffeur and butler in a wealthy family to become the third brother in the family. Yet traces of the original novel which indicate Cheng’s lesser status can still be found occasionally

‘Revolution plus love?’   239 in the text. Qianyi Yu also identifies one ultimate reason why fans attach enormous significance to the idea of equality in this fandom: the lovers are both communists, and an important goal for communism is to abolish class differences and to create an equal society. Ironically, due to the fan writers’ often unconvincing attempts to restore significance to the revolutionary narrative, equality between the lovers becomes the most prominent, and sometimes the only, articulation of communism in many Lou/Cheng stories. This absolute belief in equality—among social classes, in particular—sets Lou/Cheng stories in direct contrast with the social conditions in post-­socialist China, in which social stratification and hierarchical solidification are seldom questioned. By valorizing equality, Lou/Cheng fans also—probably unintentionally—subvert the ancient Chinese ‘cut-­sleeves’ culture, in which homosexual relationships between men manifest social hierarchy and power dominance (see Hinsch 1992). The master/servant coupling of Lou and Cheng actually resonates with this tradition. In other words, the equality and mutual respect in a relationship built on such an unequal basis becomes the manifestation of Lou and Cheng’s communist faith, even if ‘revolution’ itself is devoid of concrete communist ideology. As earlier revolution-­plus-love stories demonstrate, romantic relationships also face the issue of balancing public and domestic life. He Guimei notes in her discussion of Song of Youth that the female protagonist chooses the communist revolutionary Jiang Hua as her lover (He 2010, p. 13). This choice is legitimized by his devotion to communist revolutionary activities in public life, but also by his willingness to share housework with the female protagonist in their domestic life, which is in direct contrast with her first petit-­bourgeois lover. In other words, in heterosexual love stories, revolution and love are the key themes of the public and domestic spheres respectively, but they also tend to converge in an equal, mutually respectful relationship. This dynamic between the public and the private takes a particular twist in the Lou/Cheng stories. Because both men are secret agents, domestic life, which usually serves as the site of heterosexual love and filial duty, is simply another site of covert operations. The domestic life in Ming’s family is unique because the family consists of four siblings, with the two youngest brothers adopted, but no parents. In other words, the family is not structured through heterosexual romantic love or filial relationships under a patriarchal structure. The traditional patriarchal order is embodied by the traditional maternal nurturing figure of the elder sister, who remains unmarried until the end of the story. For Lou and Cheng’s subplot in The Disguiser, the major conflict does not occur between ‘revolution’ and ‘love’ but revolution and an asexual everyday domestic life: the mundane everyday life of this peculiar family is devoid of romantic love but serves as a camouflage for their lives as secret agents. Lou/ Cheng fanfictions add another type of hidden identity—a homoerotic relationship between Lou and Cheng, hidden behind the façade of their roles as elder brother/younger brother and master/servant, played out both in front of the enemies and of their family members. Just as they are undercover revolutionary

240   Xiqing Zheng soldiers in a puppet government, Lou and Cheng are also queer undercovers in domestic life. To counter the non-­revolutionary revolution in the ideologically hollowed out revolution-­plus-love narratives, the Lou/Cheng stories provide a non-­domestic domesticity that disrupts the stable narrative structure which anchors revolution and love in public and domestic lives respectively. Mockmockmock designs an intriguing scene in her story, in which Lou and Cheng meet Anthony Blunt, the legendary Soviet spy based at Cambridge University. After a brief conversation, Lou tells Cheng that he does not know whether Blunt is of the same kind of people as they are, that ‘[presently], Cambridge expels two types of people, open communists and homosexuals caught in action’ (spinario 2018, Chapter 2). The direct connection drawn between a queer identity and communism is not a coincidence as, historically, socialist revolution and early struggles for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights are closely intertwined, and both groups have been persecuted by imperialist powers, including Britain and France. The combination of revolution and love (we could directly call them communism and homosexual romance) opens up an ambiguous third space besides those of public and domestic life, where queer communists’ secret identities and beliefs are mutually exclusively reserved for one another. Homosexual love occupies a completely different symbolic position from heterosexual romance in this dynamic. Lou and Cheng are rebellious heroes in both their revolutionary endeavours and in their choice of lovers; in their steadfast faith in both revolution and love these two—revolution and love—not only mirror one another, but also reinforce and even validate one another. Interestingly, very few Lou/Cheng writers ever touch on the issue of the homophobic cultural environment in communist China. These writers construct the relationship between Lou and Cheng as only about these two people, about their mental and spiritual equality. The homosexual utopia and the communist faith mix and mirror one another in such an uncanny way in the fandom that they lend legitimacy to one other, valorize and elevate each other as they valorize the characters. Although the majority of Lou/Cheng writings fail to escape a typical neoliberal understanding of the post-­ revolutionary world, the absent traditional belief in the communist revolution still finds its presence in a steadfast homosexual romance; love and revolution are inseparable, at least in the revolutionary age.

Conclusion Over the past 20 years Chinese online writings, especially romantic writings, have evolved into a culturally and ideologically contested terrain. While commercialized online romance, under the influence of neoliberal discourse, tends to conceive of love as a highly individualistic matter, detached from socio-­ historical conditions, Lou/Cheng stories squarely ground the same-­sex love between the Ming brothers in a specific time–space and revive the memory of a revolutionary past that is beyond the officially sanctioned narrative. Such unorthodox memory has long been suppressed in post-­socialist China, due to the fear

‘Revolution plus love?’   241 that it would instigate social turbulence and subversion against the current oppressive social structure. While it is common knowledge that fan writings often focus on the marginal and overshadowed aspects of the original texts, the revolutionary imagination in Lou/Cheng fanfictions is even more complicated, as it is rooted in a banal, officially approved media text. Celebrating a nominally official ideology and motivated by the desire to understand and recreate an authentic legend of the founding fathers of the ruling party, Lou/Cheng fanfictions adopt the age-­old writing formula of revolution-­plus-love; the only deviation is the homosexual sentiments. Despite being full of conflicts and ambivalence, these works of fanfiction develop into large-­scale self-­reflexive debates about official representations of the revolutionary past. Fans’ dual passions for truthful historical narratives of communist revolution and for stories of romantic love, especially homosexual love, further motivate them to understand the elements that start and sustain an idealistic desire for something forbidden, whether that is a communist future or homosexual love. Such literary imagination does not necessarily motivate fanfiction readers and writers to take part in social activism of any kind—most of these readers and writers have no memory of the Maoist past. Yet it does complement the fans’ understanding of communism, kindle their interest in the intertwined history of communism and the LGBT rights movement and re-­invoke an age-­old faith in equality and social justice, even if only in a highly romanticized and abstract way. The utopia of equality in Lou/Cheng stories serves both as the goal for a better society and as the model for an ideal intimate relationship whatever the sexual orientation. After all, revolution and love share a close relationship and offer subversive potential in the neoliberal world, once both take on—even if only incompletely—their lost significance.

Notes 1 See Lofter’s fan fiction popularity page for further details: www.lofter.com/act/animeR ank?op=new&starttime=1469980800000&act=qbpchotlist_20160720_02. 2 SAPPRFT was abolished and restructured as the State Administration of Radio and Television (SART) in 2018. 3 See this list of bans by SAPPRFT: www.entgroup.cn/news/Policies/1626495.shtml. The original governmental order cannot be found online.  4 ‘Red Classics’ is an unofficial term that generally refers to literary and media products celebrated in Maoist China. These works are mainly stories from the 1920s–1940s revolutionary period or the period of communist construction that took place from the 1950s–1970s. 5 ‘Scholar and beauty fiction’, or ‘Caizi jiaren fiction’, is a genre in Chinese fiction that depicts the love story between a young scholar and a beautiful girl. See Chapter 1 for more information about the genre. 6 May Fourth literature generally refers to the literary creations under the ‘New Culture Movement’ in late 1910s and early 1920s China; they mainly called for the creation of new Chinese culture under modern and Western values such as science and democracy. 7 Because of extreme internet censorship, many of the fanfictions I quote or mention in this chapter have been partly or completed removed from the original website (Lofter) on which they were first posted. In several cases, I therefore reference reposts of these

242   Xiqing Zheng stories instead of the original post. Here, the author Mockmockmock, using another pseudonym, spinario, posted the story on the US-­based fanfiction site AO3 in 2018, almost three years after the story was first written. 8 The Anti-­Rightist Campaign is a political campaign launched by the Chinese Communist Party from 1957 to 1959, in order to purge ‘Rightists’ from the Party. The campaign resulted in severe political persecution right across China.

References Abu. 2015. ‘Shututonggui di shiliuzhang hupan pang shulin bian’ [Reaching the Same Goal through Different Paths, Chapter Sixteen ‘Beside the Lake and the Forest’]. Lofter, 10 December. http://sporule.lofter.com/post/2ee696_9377bb5. Braester, Yomi. 2016. ‘The Post-­Maoist Politics of Memory’. In: A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Yingjin Zhang. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 434–451. Feng, Jin. 2013. Romancing the Internet: Consuming and Producing Chinese Web Romance. Leiden: Brill. Gao, Mobo. 2008. The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution. London: Pluto Press. Gong, Qian. 2017. ‘The Red Sister-­in-Law Remakes: Redefining the “Fish-­and-Water” Relationship for the Era of Reform and Opening’. In: The Making and Remaking of China’s ‘Red Classics’: Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture, edited by Rosemary Roberts and Li Li. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 156–176. He, Guimei. 2006. ‘Xing/zhengzhi de zhuanhuan yu zhangli’ [Transitions and Tensions between Sex/Politics]. Modern Chinese Literature Studies Series 2006 (5): 70–92. He, Guimei. 2010. ‘Kejian de nüxing ruhe keneng’ [How Can Visible Women Be Possible?]. Modern Chinese Literature Series 2010 (3): 1–15. Helan. 2015. ‘Taoli chunfeng’ [Peach and Plum Blossoms in Spring Breeze]. Diyu shijiu ceng [The Nineteenth Ring of Hell], 9 December. http://death19.com/xl/viewthread. php?tid=70353. Hinsch, Bret. 1992. Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hughes, Christopher R. 2006. Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era. London and New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry. 2012. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Kong, Shuyu. 2012. ‘The “Affective Alliance”: Undercover, Internet Media Fandom, and the Sociality of Cultural Consumption in Postsocialist China’. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24 (1): 1–47. Lantheo. 2016. ‘Louis et Adèle’. Lofter, 15 January. http://lantheo.lofter.com/post/ 39d362_9a30575. Lee, Haiyan. 2007. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Li, Xue (director). 2015. Weizhuang zhe [The Disguiser]. Shandong Television Media Group, Daylight Entertainment Ltd. Lian’ainao yu wutuobang. 2015. ‘Jianghe wanli’ [Ten Thousand Miles of Rivers]. Lofter, 18 September. http://jiushiyizhangpi.lofter.com/post/1d6a6a45_835c8fd. Liu, Jianmei. 2003. Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women’s Bodies and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-­Century Chinese Fiction. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.

‘Revolution plus love?’   243 Liu, Kang. 2004. Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Liu, Kang. 2010. ‘Reineventing the Red Classics in the age of Globalization’. Neohelicon 37: 329–347. McGrath, Jason. 2008. Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mao, Dun. 1935. ‘Geming yu Lian’ai de Gongshi’ [The Formulae of Revolution and Love]. Literature 4 (1). Qianyi Yu. 2016. ‘Dui mingjia san xiongdi de suisuinian’ [Some Mumbling about the Characterization of the Three Ming Brothers]. Blogspot, 2 February. http://searosesy uyu.blogspot.com/2016/02/blog-­post.html. Shelley, April. 1986. ‘ “I Have Been, and Ever Shall Be, Your Friend”: Star Trek, The Deer-­slayer and the Amer­ican Romance’. Journal of Popular Culture 20: 80–104. spinario. 2018. ‘Jusqu’à ce qu’on se Retrouve’. Archive of Our Own, 29 May. https:// archiveofourown.org/works/14787992. Wang, Ban. 1997. The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-­ Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Woledge, Elizabeth. 2006. ‘Intimatopia: Genre Intersections Between Slash and the Mainstream’. In: Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 87–114 Yang, Ling. 2017. ‘ “The World of Grand Union”: Engendering Trans/nationalism Via Boys’ Love in Chinese Online Hetalia Fandom’. In Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols, edited by Maud Lavin, Ling Yang and Jing Jamie Zhao. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 45–62.

14 A love story Li Yuchun’s fans and contemporary Chinese singledom Maud Lavin

Chinese contemporary music and fashion idol Li Yuchun, born in Chengdu in 1984, is well known for her T or tomboy-­style gender ambiguity, a localized as well as exported androgyny. Now that she is in her thirties, however, she has come additionally to represent for certain fans an image of Chinese feminine singledom that intersects with newly differentiated heterosexual imaginaries. Considering the blanket pressures—official, cultural and familial—to marry in China, the use of Li’s image by fans to fantasize about singledom bears a potentially transgressive power. The framing it comes with also provides possible limits, the now familiar ones of picturing a life contained by consumer cosmopolitanism. Currently, online circulation of Li’s commercial and social involvement with international fashion brands, with fashion’s high respectability via its affluent overtones, promotes among fans her updated and polished zhongxing— or gender neutral—style, and underlines this version’s cosmopolitan connotations. This is a style that signifies commercial success, international belonging and yet, at the same time, a unique blend of persistently differentiated Chinese femininity and chosen singledom.1 Yet that consumerist frame, related in a high-­ fashion way to a common range of contemporary Chinese urban life mass culture images, need not upstage the intensity of the singledom fantasies and the key strategies they present—it might even provide some glitter for them. These strategies include the not-­at-all-­incidental assertion of enjoying being alone, and/or arguing to prioritize an avocation over marriage. Using ethnographic approaches and textual analyses, I explore Mainland Chinese fans’ usage of Li Yuchun’s images to articulate newly emerging ideas of hetero-­feminine singledom. It is an imagining outside the traditional hetero-­marital imperative, and, in terms of the case studies included in this chapter, it can be hypothesized as part of differentiating norms for women who self-­define as heterosexual.

A hetero Li Yuchun? This hetero context bears thinking about. What if the phenomenally popular Mainland Chinese singing star Li Yuchun, arguably China’s most famous tomboy, were heterosexual? An ocean and more away, I cannot read her as straight. And there’s a subset of her fans in China who read her online and

A love story   245 e­ lsewhere as lesbian, as Ling Yang and Hongwei Bao, for example, have discussed (Yang and Bao 2012). But it seems that the majority of her fans in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), particularly her most active fans, called Corns or yumi, do read—or at least publicly articulate—Li’s stylistic blending of meng (a melting, innocent appeal), ku (cool), and zhongxing (gender neutral) as straight (Li 2017). And this articulation now, as pertains to her 33-year-­old (as of 2018) single status, is intriguing and meaningful for non-­normative hetero-­ femininities in contemporary China. It is worth emphasizing here that over 90 per cent of women in China marry before the age of 30. (They marry men; same­gender marriages are not legal in China.) And of the Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development (OECD) countries, China has the highest marriage rate—about twice as high as the average for the group.2 Eva Li (2017) has astutely analyzed zhongxing as a projection screen of respectability that at times veils queer tomboy identities in East Asian Chinese-­ language cultures. The zhongxing look for someone interpreted as heterosexual can also signify a self-­made Chinese new ‘new woman’, whose public persona can be read as independent yet fashionable (therefore still feminine). In Li’s celebrity case, this includes being unmarried with social integrity—not an easy balance for anyone to achieve in contemporary China, as the recent and well-­ known debates about ‘leftover’ women have shown. As has been much discussed, the Chinese government has amplified fears and derision concerning sheng nu status and has promoted and continues to promote marriage; in this context the celebration of singledom and femininity in the Li Yuchun fandom is powerful.3 Li Yuchun is a non-­standard, unmarried, yet famously successful (with many more fans than anti-­fans) and cosmopolitan woman. A singing star, also with movie roles, she lives in Beijing, has appeared on CCTV’s New Year Gala and in the 2010s has done many product and brand endorsements, for instance, in 2016 becoming the face of Gucci Asia accessories. This is not how Li Yuchun first appeared on China’s entertainment scene. In 2005, she won the amateur televised singing contest Super Girl. For the final crowning episode of that season, the number of viewers who not only watched but voted via texting was over 400 million; that number is more than the populations of the US and Canada combined (Yue and Yu 2008). What they saw in the then 21-year-­old Li Yuchun was a reedy, tall, gawky, boyish, fresh-­faced singer, very T-­style (for some signifying a lesbian, masculine-­leaning gender, for many simply very androgynous), whose hair looked like she had cut it herself with cooking shears. Twelve years later, her image still bears some of these connotations but primarily signifies great entertainment-­star success—and hand in hand with that, a woman adaptable to and well known in international fashion, seen on the covers of Vogue China, Harper’s Bazaar China and L’Officiel China, among others. With the research assistance of designer Star Sijia Liu, herself a Corn, a Beijinger and a former School of the Art Institute of Chicago student of mine, in 2015 I email-­interviewed 21 fans (contacted through Baidu and Weibo) who read—or at least articulated a reading of—Li as hetero-­feminine, as part of an

246   Maud Lavin exploration of the reception of her persona that was interpreted by some as hetero-­but-different. The year 2015 was a time when Li Yuchun was already well established in endorsing international beauty products and fashions. In this chapter, I explore these interviews and the issues of singledom they express. In addition, in the context of the 2010s, and specifically of these 2015 interviews, I scrutinize and carry out textual analyses of three characteristic Li images over time, to consider the evolution of Li’s looks and what they cumulatively might signify to fans: her youthful tomboyish performance in 2006 covering ‘One Night in Beijing’; her fashionable and meng pant-­suited singing of ‘Shu Embroidery’ in the 2015 CCTV Spring Gala show; and her incarnation in 2016 at one of her Cannes Film Festival red carpet appearances representing the international cosmetic brand L’Oréal. The 2015 interviews could thus be seen as retrospective in considering the first two looks, and as immediately presaging the adult-­ androgyny Cannes look of 2016. I analyze the context of Li Yuchun’s evolving public image from 2005 to today together with fan interview responses for what these might suggest about fan attitudes toward non-­marital, Chinese, hetero-­ femininities at their recent and current state of differentiation. Since 2002, there has been a slight decrease in the Chinese marriage rate and an increase in the divorce rate (the crude divorce rate for the PRC as of 2016 stands at 2.8 per 1000 population, as compared to, say, that of the US at 3.2 per 1000) (Kai 2016; OECD 2018). However, marriage is still the usual way of life for most adults in China in the many decades of adult life preceding old age (Ren 2016). In China (as in many other countries), many married women face the double burden of familial caregiver at home and worker at the workplace. The institution of marriage is also fraught for women, as recent Chinese history has shown; an unfair and unequal division of assets in the man’s favour tends to occur when there is a divorce (David and Friedman 2014). In her early thirties, beyond the time when most Mainland women are married (the current average age of first marriage for women in China is 27),4 Li maintains her single status. For fans who read her as heterosexual, Li’s supposed hetero-­femininity seems to function as an area for projection telling—for the self-­making fantasies of these fans, whether single or married—of a fashionable hetero-­feminine single life, albeit that of a star. As one fan fantasized about Li, ‘She keeps single because she is a curious person. If she never meets someone that she wants, she may keep single for her whole life. Also, she enjoys the feeling of being alone.’5 This fan is a 30-year-­old female from Chengdu, Li’s birthplace, who has a bachelor’s degree, is an employee of a state-­owned enterprise and is unmarried.6 Although some cultural critics have expressed disappointment in Li’s oscillation between androgynous and more feminine fashion since the late 2000s (in contrast with her steadier T-­style when she first rose to fame), I argue that Li Yuchun’s embodiment and representation of a diversified normativity, along with her statuses as a celebrity and as a single woman, holds a significant kind of power with the great proportion of her PRC fans who self-­identify with heterosexuality and femininity (Huang 2013). This power is particularly resonant at a time when the pressure on Chinese women to marry by their late twenties and

A love story   247 correspondingly to conform to an uneven distribution of domestic power and assets is both hegemonic and, among some, questioned (Fincher 2014). Yet there can be public disapproval of voicing questions about this marital system and governmental wariness—and sometimes aggression—towards feminism, as with the 2015 arrests of the Feminist Five,7 which could mean that voicing allegiances in the more easily negotiated sphere of mass culture fandoms is both appealing and especially meaningful. It is important, though, to realize that connotatively Li’s current high- fashion image (photographed, for instance, at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival wearing a Julien Fournié black vinyl gown and at the 2016 New York City Metropolitan Museum Costume Gala wearing a Givenchy lace-­adorned tux), still bears the stamp of her rise to fame as a tomboy, with its associations of sexual and gender ambiguity. Consider, in particular, Jean-­Paul Gautier’s design of Li’s costumes for the 2012–2013 Crazy World Tour and his history of designs for gender-­ neutral Asian stars. Persistently, however, Li’s high-­fashion publicity shots almost always connote her singleness. In these she is almost always shown alone, heightening her image as single and perhaps thus available for communing with her fans. The traces of sexual and gender ambiguity she still carries in her images are often interpreted by mainstream Chinese female fans (Corns) who consider her heterosexual (one might say who insist on considering her heterosexual) as signs of independence. Such an interpretation may, for some, reflect a workforce identification with Li. For instance, a married 43-year-­old fan, who is a civil servant in Xi’an and has an MA degree, asserts, ‘I was attracted by her strong confidence and high level of professionalism’.8 Recurrently, respect for Li’s work and for prioritizing her time in terms of work comes up in the fan responses as to why Li is single. In general, in the fan interviews there seems to be a functional blurring between Li’s chosen work as a singer (and now actor and model too) and other workforce jobs, that is, a blurring of avocation and vocation—under the umbrella of career—for purposes, I would surmise, of identification. As a single, 20-year-­old Beijing undergraduate puts it: I believe the reason she keeps single is that she has never met a guy who really understands her and wants to grow old along with her. Her busy work also makes her not have time to think about her own marriage.9 For the purposes of this analysis I am putting aside questions of what Li’s sexuality might actually be in her private life and am focusing instead on her public personae in which she, as is the case with the majority of Mainland Chinese popular singers, does not identify her orientation, nor indeed speak of her sexuality at all. My focus is on how Li Yuchun’s femininity and singledom are read by certain fans, and how these might pertain to their own subjectivities (Engebretsen 2014). Fans tend to have definitive ideas connected to romantic and marital choice about why Li Yuchun is still single in her thirties. One fan, aged 28, from Chengdu, with a master’s degree, who works in IT and is single, asserts, ‘I don’t

248   Maud Lavin think she will always stay single. She chooses to be single not because of [the type of] her appeal, but I think she just has not met the right one.’10 A single 20-year-­old undergraduate in Suzhou posits: It is boring if a person only likes to wear dresses and skirts. But if someone can wear both a suit and a skirt, it is interesting. So I like Li Yuchun who can do this … I don’t think [being single] is a problem about her appeal, but about fate. She still has not met that guy. I believe that one day, one person will appear, who is someone that she knows well, and also knows her well. That person is on the way to meet her.11 Hypothesizing about issues that ‘standard’ Chinese men in Li Yuchun’s dating pool might have is revealing in terms of fears of male judgementalism about what a woman should be. A 22-year-­old single undergraduate fan in Wuhan, who calls herself Macchiato, commented:  [S]he bears too many criticisms these years by herself [a reference to comments by Li’s anti-­fans]. These experiences make her strong and independent. Although she doesn’t like to reject others, she doesn’t flatter others either. Many males think she is hard to access because of this (except some men with very good taste.) I really hope she will meet [some]one who will love her and cherish her.12  A single, 28-year-­old undergraduate in Edmonton, originally from Guangzhou, praises the feminine side of Li’s different looks, Her feminine looks also include the fresh and cool feeling of boys. It is a subtle balance. I don’t like the looks that are too robust. Her different styles show different appeal, so that makes people feel interested, just like how I feel. And the 28-year-­old undergraduate is quite critical of how she imagines potential Chinese male suitors might react to Li—and perhaps, I would conjecture, to herself: Chinese culture makes the public feel her independent figure is different from normal women. There are more and more men with low qualities in society. Their taste and aesthetic as concerns women are dull and monotonous, and they don’t respect women. They slander everything that does not fit their preferences. Also, in their minds, using words for genitals to describe the body and figure of a female is interesting. They’re never aware of their disrespect for women. In my mind, they’re ridiculous, and even some women assent to these behaviours. So, in this environment, these behaviours might affect her feelings about men. I think she doesn’t want to make the normal one as Mr. Right. She doesn’t mind about keeping single,

A love story   249 and she won’t marry for marriage but [only] for love. Her appeal and temperament can be a reason, but her personality, work environment (the entertainment circle is too complicated) and being busy with work are more of the reason. All of these factors make her keep single now.13 Yet, Li Yuchun is not the only Chinese female celebrity to be single. Names that come quickly to mind are the actresses Xu Jinglei, born in 1974, aged 43 at the time of writing and Jiang Xin, born in 1983, at the time of writing, aged 34—both never married, both linked with men in their romantic relationships. Xu Jinglei’s single status has even received press on both sides of the Pacific since her controversial action in 2013 when she flew to the US to freeze her eggs, thus getting around the ban in the PRC for single women to use this procedure (Nelson 2015). This example is a useful reminder that to some degree celebrities can be held to a different standard than the must-­be-married-­andprocreate that is typical for so many Chinese women after their mid-­twenties. As Ling Yang has observed, the case of Xu is also a reminder of the different layers, modes and models of female singledom—and how Li Yuchun as a celebrity represents in this varied context. Yang asserts, I personally think Li has gone much further than Xu, because Li is not only single but professionally and emotionally independent. She has made her career without sleeping or getting romantically involved with any powerful men in the male-­dominated entertainment industry. Xu, on the other hand, has been known for choosing the ‘right’ boyfriends to help her advance her career and has been in a stable heterosexual relationship during the past 7 years … Li Yuchun’s androgynous appearance, no matter how diluted, is also quite different from Xu’s stereotypical ‘girl of talent’ (cainv) persona.14 Among the top Chinese female entertainment stars, Li Yuchun is still unique, then, as an icon of independence. Whether at the beginning of her fame in 2005 when she appeared as a tomboy-­style, male-­song-singing youth to her slick, fashionable, expensive clothes wearing persona today, still androgynous, she appears for some as connotatively lesbian, for others as hetero with merely a fashionable nod to styles associated with the tomboy and, for so many fans, most generally as a hetero but different kind of woman. Thus, Li Yuchun’s public image functions as a screen for projections, not only for singleness but for being single as a choice and as a marker for differentiating femininities. As has often been noted, Li’s fandom is massively female. Although that could easily lead to the assumption that Li’s image does not appeal to men, it is significant that the female fans who articulate views about her singledom in the heterosexual context they imagine for her tend to describe her status as primarily her choice (i.e. not due to lack of appeal to men). It is also possible that some of Li Yuchun’s more mainstream fans may privately consider her to be a lesbian but publicly, on fan sites and in email interviews, may choose to ‘protect’ her by describing her as heterosexual, and

250   Maud Lavin suggesting, for example, she has not met the right man yet (Li 2017). However, whatever they believe, that they articulate supportive theories about her choice to be single in words that imply her heterosexuality is still revealing and useful for how they use her publicly to voice imaginaries of other priorities than a twenty-­something-commanded-­start to marriage with a man. If Li Yuchun now has a thirty-­something straight persona, it is a fashionably clothed and powerfully differentiated one—seemingly hetero-­feminine and perseveringly single. Zooming in to select Li images is intriguing in working out the complex connotations of her appeal which registers for some, perhaps many, fans as non-­normative hetero-­feminine.

‘One Night in Beijing’ 2006 cover Li Yuchun came to fame as a tomboy pop singer, with a strong nod from the start to Pop-­China marketability, possibly rebellious but also fresh-­faced and with clear ties to mainstream pop music.15 Consider Li Yuchun’s often-­performed (starting in 2006) covering of Chen Sheng’s long-­time hit ‘One Night in Beijing’.16 Written in 1991 by Taiwanese pop singer Chen (Bobby) Sheng, the song is regularly performed as a duet between a man and a woman, as for instance in a 2008 performance with Rocky Lin and the operatic Liu Jiahui.17 In the 2000s, the song quickly became a karaoke standard in East Asia. Yet, at the same time, its ultra-­familiar tune still has the potential to deliver an emotional punch, as a song of nostalgic mourning for a misspent youth. Although written in 1991, ‘One Night in Beijing’ contains allusions to historical Chinese warlord history: ‘One night in Beijing, I left behind a lot of emotion/ Men making toasts and singing drinking songs/ are the wolves of the north.’18 It also alludes to a youth drinking too much and getting lost in Beijing, not daring ‘to ask directions at midnight, for fear of disturbing a grieving soul’. It is written to sound like an old song, with its operatic range and its ancient references, or at least pre-­PRC references.19 It also sounds like contemporary Gang Tai (Hong Kong–Taiwan) Mandopop with its tribute to yearning and lost love (‘I’ve already waited a thousand years, why isn’t my husband back’) (Moskowitz 2010). In gendered terms it sounds both like (in its duet form) a man and a woman blending in lament, and yet also polarizing (through its lyrics) with the female voice emphasizing waiting and the male voice wandering. Its references are at once Mainland Chinese and also, particularly as performed by rock groups such as the Taiwanese Xin Tue Tuan in 2006, easily recognizable as related to both Western rock and Western–Eastern hybrid rock. The song also sounds, even when sung and written by Taiwanese singers or groups, like a reference to contemporary Beijing rock and Beijing history (Shin sings the song in Mandarin with a Beijing accent).20 Its various coverings, with their overt pastiches of old and new references, are ripe as containers for the evolution of stereotype; for this is how stereotypes evolve—very familiar icons tweaked in new ways. Same but different, different but same.

A love story   251 Typically, there is a messiness to stereotype evolution too. The connotations of Li Yuchun’s performance of the song centre on gender issues and their imagined ties to Chinese history. In performances in China (for instance, Shanghai in 2006 and Hong Kong in 2007), she sang ‘One Night in Beijing’ accompanied by a traditional string instrument (the erhu), the flute and playing a Chinese cymbal herself. In the music video from the Shanghai performance, Li Yuchun is dressed all in white (which can be read or misread as a generalized reference to the sacred and/or innocence; all white or all black were frequent although not constant costume colour choices for the singer in her first years in the public eye). She wears a white button-­down shirt, white cotton pants, a thin silver belt and white shoes, adorned by a modest necklace that appears to be a simple leather strip supporting a small medallion. Her hair is short, her make-­up quite light. Quite androgynous, she sings both the male and female parts as coextensive; she embodies a unity through voice and gesture and appearance. The song also allows her to show off her multi-­gendered vocal range from operatic falsetto to deep bass. In general, although not strong-­voiced, she is known for her range, which can be read as signifying both masculine and feminine singing capabilities. With the reference to Chinese musical tradition, to cosmopolitan urbanity, to a blurring of genders, Li Yuchun presents her persona as a rocker yet also as hinging on a historical, even traditional, androgyny. Yet, Li Yuchun’s androgyny is also one underpinned by an assumed contemporaneity for her majority-­female fans, an independent cosmopolitan feminine set of desires. The later consumerist high-­fashion frame, then, fits over this earlier strong assertion of androgyny, and the combining of powers of male and female genders it implies, to add an exclamation mark of popular acceptability—and dressed in female-­appropriate fashion, too! Li Yuchun’s androgyny has also from the beginning been translatable in a pan-­Asian way; one connotational referent is to Korean and Japanese androgynous youth cultures, and another is to her own PRC stardom. It comes as no surprise that later in 2012 she was named by the Korean Tourist Organization (KTO) to promote South Korean tourist trips to independently minded Chinese young women—who presumably are employed in jobs that provide some expendable income for travelling. Pitch-­perfect, a spokesperson for the KTO, Han Hwa-­joon, director of KTO’s China team, articulated to the Korea Herald that with Li Yuchun as their visible face, ‘We plan to promote travel to Chinese women with Li’s free-­spirited and boyish charm. Li has drawn a huge female fan base in China with her unconventional character’ (Woo-­young 2012).

Li Yuchun in the 2015 CCTV Spring Gala Like other pop idols, Li Yuchun has rapidly become more polished and commercialized over the years. Her pop persona burnishing is commonly noted, including in a way by Li herself when she famously contemplated large projections of her image changing over time since 2005 in the closing segment of her 2015 ‘Why Me?’ concert.21 Perhaps the most official stamp of the acceptance of her

252   Maud Lavin 30-something pop style was Li’s appearance at the 2015 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the approximately four-­and-a-­half hour variety show televised annually by the leading national station for the lunar new year (Lu 2009). CCTV’s Spring Gala is the pinnacle in government-­approved content and the most widely watched television show annually in China. For the 2015 Gala, Li sang a song, ‘Shu Embroidery’, she had originally released in 2009, with lyrics by the young novelist Guo Jingming from Li’s home province of Sichuan and music by Yan Dandan and Liu Jia. The song itself can be seen as a kind of homage both to her roots and to contemporary Chinese pop culture. Embroidery is an important historical craft and commercial export of Sichuan. Li wears a figure-­hugging light pink, flower-­embroidered pant-­suit, which is in keeping with the tomboyish flavour of her style but emphasizes her now womanly curves and is more feminine-­inflected with its soft pink and delicate flowers, worn over a light-­pink shell, than masculine-­inflected, even with the Oxford-­like shoes Li sports. Her make-­up is rosy with glitter eye shadow and her short hair is expensively coiffed and neat, all giving her a light and bright look. The pant-­suit is designed by the internationally famous Taiwanese-­based designer Shiatzy Chen. (Taiwan would, of course, be considered another province by the Chinese government; the designer is therefore a Chinese-­branded symbol of China’s pride on the international fashion stage.) Li appears here as a mature female Chinese pop star with a sprinkling of her tomboyish tradition. The stand out in this number though is the holography. This solo marks the first time holography was used in the televised Gala, yet it has been something of a highly crafted technological staple in East Asian pop music concerts (Liew 2016). The uses of live concert holography range from reinstating pan-­Asian pop stars of yore such as Teresa Teng onto the stage to sing with a current idol to presenting a technostar like Hatsune Miku in ‘real life’ stage presence. Thus in-­ concert holography signifies the height of idol-­dom, even a worshipful one of an idol who has passed away, as well as the height of technological imaging. Its use in this Li Yuchun solo is to align her mega-­stardom officially with the new, and thus Chinese pop stardom with the most advanced—particularly the most advanced in East Asia—cosmopolitan pop culture. In this context the persistence of Li’s gender-­neutral style, though here heavily leaning towards the feminine (and the mature feminine at that), becomes one more pop cosmopolitan signifier. And, yet, the gender differentiation that she represents for so many fans, even when squarely conceived within the hetero-­feminine, seems still to have required some anxiety management in the staging. There is an overdetermined treatment of the lineage of Chinese femininity in the introduction to this Spring Gala number. At the start, multiple holograms of Chinese model-­perfect, ultra-­ feminine women in differently embroidered traditional dress from different decades appear, before Li has even entered. These flit across the stage, with the models shown in graceful motion and mainly skin-­tight clothing, while a light show of graphics surrounds the images. The images then coalesce into four stills of the traditionally dressed women on screens. So these introductory images pay tribute to Chinese embroidery heritage as well as a hyper-­feminine

A love story   253 (not at all androgynous) part of the modern Chinese tradition of womanly appearance. The screens showing the graphics of the four women part. And then Li Yuchun appears in her pant-­suit, walking on from the viewers’ stage left. Amazing graphics form around her—holographic versions of flowers and plants from traditional embroidery vocabulary. She is, the viewer realizes, in fact a hologram; it multiplies. She seems to be dancing with one image of herself, then three others, all identical. The analogy is that she is the four women, brought up to date. After a complex, impressive holographic show, a collection of holographic images combines into the real Li Yuchun who appears on a lift, and then steps off it onto another part of the stage closer to the audience. She appears soft and rosy, warm; and the camera which was pulled back, now offers close-­ups of her face as she closes the song. Li’s Spring Gala appearance was well received by fans. As the 28-year-­old undergraduate fan in Edmonton (originally from Guangzhou) summarized in her response: The performance is very good and also publicizes Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage. Her body movements are very attractive, and show her charm on stage. I like her handsome actions, in combination with her soft female body. The song is full of Chinese style, alleviating and beautiful.… The technology is very interesting. It is shocking to see four Li Yuchuns performing together.22

The 2016 black vinyl ballgown and high fashion androgyny A number of the winners and finalists from Super Girl were tomboys or sported a tomboy look (Zhao 2016). But Li Yuchun is the only one to continue presenting herself with strong tomboy elements in her thirties. Others, like Bibi Zhou (Zhou Bichang, b. 1985), were markedly tomboyish in their twenties, but as they strove to persist in working in the entertainment industry past the age of 30 they became conventionally feminized in their public images. In doing so, they were compatible with mainstream cultural mores that (sometimes) accepted tomboyish girls not as out lesbians but as immature, not fully sexualized, premarital youths (Martin 2010). In the PRC, with adulthood predicated on marriage and marriage expected for women by their mid-­to-late twenties (Fincher 2014), a woman is viewed after that age as fully (hetero-)sexual and mature, thus expected to look adult-­feminine (ideally, S-­curved, long haired, etc.). Li Yuchun, though, in her thirties looks, either varies between masculine and feminine attire or, perhaps most at the time of writing (2017), wears elements of both as a fashionable montage. Her thirtyish androgyny is outspoken in its contrastingly gendered, quite legible montage elements, as in a tux (masculine) in black lace (feminine) and a black vinyl (masculine) ballgown (feminine). It is high fashion. It is profitable. Li continues as a megastar supported by a huge fan

254   Maud Lavin base of loyal fans. And, with them, Li has cracked the endorsement ceiling for Mainland Chinese pop stars—hard. In spring 2013, Li became a L’Oréal China spokesperson, following in the footsteps of the more feminized movie stars, Gong Li and Fan Bingbing (although Li has also been in movies, her fame comes from her pop music trajectory). In fact, Li’s tomboyishness in her first L’Oréal campaign became the subject of enormous discussion and some controversy on Weibo. Jing Daily estimates that over two million participated, driving the campaign into the top five trending Weibo topics, a first for any marketing campaign. Capitalizing on Li’s robustly engaged fandom, L’Oréal tied its pre-­sale orders to the length of the Li Yuchun promotional video it was boosting. The higher the number of orders, the longer the video it offered. The company sold over 10,000 pre-­orders in four days (Hou 2013). The video shows Li as a tomboyish, pants-­wearing rocker—albeit a carefully made up (with lightened skin) and coiffed one in expensive looking leather jacket and pants.23 So the look was profitable within China. Li has continued as a L’Oréal (now multi-­product) spokesperson since then, appearing for the brand regularly at the annual Cannes Film Festival, for instance. In 2016, she red-­carpeted the Julien Fournié black vinyl ballgown, stately and mature, with a flamboyantly feminine and glamorously oversized skirt in a hardcore masculine material and colour. It was much photographed and circulated in Chinese and Western media. Li’s grown-­up androgyny plays well and likely pays well internationally, too. While the persistence of tomboyishness, or elements of it, in Li’s public appearances can be linked to endorsement success, it is also resonant with a look of independence for the mature, single, over-­30, cosmopolitan Chinese woman. Thus, Li Yuchun’s adult image combining masculinity and femininity provides a screen for fan and follower imagination and projection. Whatever Li’s sexuality and gender self-­definition may in fact be, this cosmopolitan, independent adult woman stereotype evolution is for some fans assumed to be within a heterosexual context and is used as a screen for a differentiated hetero-­feminine projection. Some fans easily refer to Li as potentially with a man but deciding according to her own principles either to be choosy, to be on her own for a while focusing on her work or to be categorically single. This imaginary for a megastar is not a small matter in a country where the social stigma for women who are single can be overwhelmingly negative. In this light, the words of a 19-year-­old Chonqing fan of Li Yuchun’s resonate powerfully as they arch from thoughts of Li’s style to those about life choices: It is rare to find one girl who can transform her style freely, and there are no styles she cannot hold.… She has a strong mind and she is very independent. For her, maybe love is not what she wants now. She is a person who knows what she needs, so every choice of hers is reasonable. Her appeal can be a reason for her single status, but being single also can be related to her concept of love and outlook on life.24

A love story   255 For many fans, it would seem, their romance with Li Yuchun links to at least imagining a love of singledom.

Conclusion To conclude, I will invoke Yau Ching’s now-­classic essay ‘Dreaming of Normal While Sleeping with Impossible’, which so movingly talks about queer Sinophone longings and embodiments for normativities even while such asymptotic reaches serve to underline, even enforce, queer difference (Yau 2010). There is a complex balancing act she references that can (differently for people of different intersectional identities) at once contribute to heartbreak and thriving when experienced in everyday life. I would hypothesize that certain fans’ articulation of Li as single, independent and hetero-­feminine in her thirties can contribute to an imagining of the self in the future while also striving for this balance in the present. Echoing Zhao (Chapter 12) and Zheng (Chapter 13), my discussion provides further evidence of female cultural consumers’ creativity and imaginativeness. While participating in this hugely popular, majority-­female fandom of Li Yuchun, such imaginings could be transgressive in fostering (or contributing to the fostering of ) self-­acceptance and differentiating normativities outside the hetero-­marital, whether or not a given fan is married. For it could be argued that well-­being in a marriage also requires the ability to imagine an outside beyond that status, an alternative. In China, with its incredibly high marital rate, it could be flattening to not be able to imagine the self as single. This is especially the case for women who, as many commentators have noted, are disadvantaged by either being in a thriving marriage with the potential triple duty of housework plus family member care and work outside the home or, in the event of divorce, receiving a likely disadvantageous and unequal share of the marital assets. Li’s fandom, however divided and containing contentiousness as well as love, is relatively safe; it is a female safe place where—if not here, then where?—singledom can be imagined. Even for those who elect to marry, this fantasy supports the myth of choice, and although choice feminism can be easily critiqued by those who already bask in it, those who feel outside it can face hopes denied or harshly siloed. Li’s persona/personae, while kind of normal at this point in her prolonged celebrity life, are still queer-­ish, or at least perceived as a little bit different. Her fandom is a good fit then for asymptotic longing and projection—and for hope. It can serve as a locus of imagination of female independence even as so many are locked into hierarchical familial interdependence—or, soon will be, for those of a young age—in the structure of Chinese hetero-­marriage. A friendly place to stand to look beyond.

Notes   1 I would like to thank Qianhan Lin, SooJin Lee, Ling Yang, Jing Jamie Zhao, Star Sijia Liu, Fang-­Tze Hsu and Lori Morimoto for suggestions and feedback during the writing of this chapter.

256   Maud Lavin   2 www.oecd.org/els/family/database.htm.   3 For cultural representations related to issues of ‘leftover women’, see Zhou 2017. See also Chapter 3 (by Haiping Liu) and Chapter 7 (by Tingting Liu) in this volume.   4 www.bbc.com/news/magazine-­21320560.   5 Mainland 17, A-­Xiao, email to author, 1 April 2015, translated by Star Sijia Liu.   6 All fan information such as age, etc. is from the time of the interview.   7 Li Tingting, Wu Rongrong, Zheng Churan, Wei Tingting and Wang Man.   8 Mainland 21, email to author, 1 April 2015, translated by Star Sijia Liu.   9 Mainland 1, ‘A Fan Who Always Supports Her Quietly’, email to author, 6 January 2016, translated by Star Sijia Liu. 10 Mainland 18, ‘The One Who Appreciates Li Yuchun’, email to author, 1 April 2015, translated by Star Sijia Liu. 11 Mainland 6, ‘Macchiato’, email to author, 6 January 2015, translated by Star Sijia Liu. 12 Mainland 6, ‘Macchiato’, email to author, 6 January 2015, translated by Star Sijia Liu. 13 Mainland 16, ‘A Corn’, email to author, 1 April 2015, translated by Star Sijia Liu. 14 Ling Yang, email to author, 10 December 2017. 15 See, in general, regarding such marketability: Mark Moscowitz (2010); Shu-­mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007); Chua Beng Huat, East Asian Pop Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012). 16 www.youtube.com/watch?v= R7ZgB1VzLW. 17 www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZMpnNrrBE. 18 http://chinesesongs.livejournal.com/85546.html. 19 ‘Walking outside of Di’anmen Gate, everyone’s wearing their heart on their sleeve’ (Di’anmen Gate, was ‘demolished in the early fifties, during a period where the Communist Party set up their headquarters there’). http://chinesesongs.livejournal. com/85546.html (accessed 29 November 2012). 20 Abby Lavin, 24 November 2012; www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-E-­qintDPKk. 21 www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcliXb3Y9Tw (starting around 2:05). 22 Mainland 16, ‘A Corn’, email interview 1 April 2015, translated by Star Sijia Liu. 23 The campaign was for L’Oréal’s unfortunately named ‘Deeply White’ products, which promised skin lightening in keeping with the long colonial and post-­colonial legacy and popularity of skin whitening products across Asia. 24 Mainland 2, email to author, 6 January 2015, translated by Star Sijia Liu.

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Index

Abu-Lughod, Lila 65 Acrush 207 Addicted 210 adultery see male infidelity affect 171–172; affective labour 172, 181 affordance 171 All Quiet in Peking 231 All-China Women’s Federation 46 An Dong Ni 154 Axis Powers: Hetalia 234 bachelorhood 33–34, 145–146; bachelor villages 145; involuntary 145; rural bachelors 145–146; see also leftover men; marriage; masculinity Bai Ye 152 Baidu Tieba 116, 121–122, 168, 172 baihe (girls’ love) 154; see also danmei Bao, Hongwei 245 Beck, Ulrich 4, 7 Bellefroid, Emmanuel 186 Benshan Media Company 134, 138 Berlant, Lauren 127 Between a Couple 95 Bi Shumin 101; Purple-Flowered Cotton Curtain, The 101 body writing 154 Book of Rites, The 8 Brown, Wendy 57–58 Builders, The 95 Buss, David M. 48, 52–53, 72 Cai Xiang 14 Cao Xueqin 10, 214 censorship: of LGBT references 209–211; of online publications 154; of print publications 154 Chang, Eileen 11 Chen Kaige 136

Chen Lu 193 China Women’s News 46 Chinese Communist Party (CCP): Party line 5 Chinese dream 193 Chinese fever 194 Chinese Style Divorce, The 88 Chineseness 144, 147, 186 Choi, Susanne Yuk-Ping 114 class: marriage and 25–42; mobility 25; relationships and 8, 16; see also phoenix man; urban–rural inequality commercialization 14 communism with Chinese characteristics 231–234: homosexual identity and 237–240; integration of nationalism 231–232; love and disillusion 235–237 concubines 8; see also mistresses Confucianism: discourses on love 8; impact on rural–urban migrants 114, 118–120 Connell, Raewyn 48, 118, 126 consumerism 12; romantic love and 1, 29, 31, 113; self-worth and 38 Coolidge Effect 72 countryside: representations in literature 137–138 courtship 15, 28; see also marriage Cultural Revolution: gender relations 11; love stories in 11; see also Red Classics dangerous love campaign 185, 196–199 danmei (boys’ love) 13, 16, 154; see also baihe dating 6; see also courtship dating websites 44; see also relationship experts Dave, Naisargi N. 64–66, 77 Davies, Deborah 44, 45

Index   259 deep China 2 Deng Xiaoping 187 digital divide 171 digitalization 14; see also online literature dis-embedding 7, 100; see also re-embedding Disguiser, The 16, 226–243; fanfiction 226–243 divorce 73–77; literary movement to support women 73–77; stigma for women 73–77 domestic violence 195–196 domestic workers see maids Dongguan: sex capital of China 120 Double-Sided Adhesive Tape 83–84, 88, 89–91, 92; patriarchal thinking 92 Dream of the Red Chamber 10, 214 Du Fu 193 duty 2 Dwelling Narrowness 88 Edwards, Louise 161 emotion 171–172; see also emotional labour emotional labour 52–55, 171–172, 181 employment, precarious see precarious employment Er’ren Zhuan 138 ethical practice 64–66 eugenics campaign 46, 49–50 Evans, Harriet 5–6, 72 family 5; influence on marriage 25–26; intergenerational support 30–31; see also xiangqin fairs Fan Bingbing 254 fanfiction 64, 68, 153, 226–243; as intimatopia 237 FANXYRED 222; see also Acrush Farquhar, Judith 6, 11 Farrer, James 6, 53 Fausto-Sterling, Anne 48 Featherstone 4 Feicheng Wurao 25, 26 Fence, Women and Dogs 136 fertility 91–93 filial piety 2 Fincher, Leta Hong 44–45, 122 forbidden love 2 foreign romance see international romance foreigners: anti-foreign discourses 190; prejudice against 187; see also international romance

Foucault, Michel 65, 158 free love (ziyou lianai) 63–64, 66, 68, 109 Fu Jing 220 Game with Heaven, A 84–85 Gao Jialin 83 Gao Xiaosheng 95; ‘Chen Huansheng Went to the City’ 95 Ge Shuiping 100; Lianqiao 100 gender: changing roles 16; differences 29, 73; inequality 56–58, 71–72 Giddens, Anthony 7, 46, 100 Girl Liu Qiao’er, The 135 globalization 14 Go! Princess Go! 207, 214–218 Going to the Mountains and the Countryside policy 135 Gong Li 254 Gong, Qian 232 Grande, Edgar 4 guilt and shame 2 Guo Jingming 151, 152, 154, 155, 161, 207; fandom 162; Ice Fantasy 152 Han Han 151, 152, 161; Triple Door 152 Han Hwa-joon 251 Han Zhijun 136 Haraway, Donna 49 Harvey, David 55 He Guimei 239 He Shang 189–190 Heavy Sweetness, Ash-Like Frost 12 heterosexual romance 13–14 Hochschild, Arlie Russell 53, 55, 171 Holding Hands 88 housing: role in marriage and class 32 Hu Jintao 98 Hughes, Christopher 231 Hui Xiao 208 hukou (household registration) system 86, 94, 98, 114, 137 Hutchby, Ian 171 Hvistendahl, Mara 145 I Belonged to You 151, 152, 158–162, 163; gender equality 159–160; masculinity 160–161 If You Are the One 122, 151 Illouz, Eva 52 Imminent Crisis 231 In the Name of the People 83, 84–85 individual choice 3 individualism 4: affective 6 individualization 4

260   Index infidelity: female 73; male see male infidelity international romance 185–202, 1980s to 1990s 188–191, 1990s to 2000s 191–194; mid-late 2000s 194–196; adultery 196; Cinderella stories 192; deception 194–195; domestic violence 195–196; love of China rhetoric 192–193; racial dimension 185, 1970s to 1980s 186–188; relationship breakdown reports 194; see also dangerous love campaign; Occidentalism internet: need for constant communication 6; virtuality 170–171; see also virtual lovers internet literature see online literature intimacy 2; changing nature of 5–8; good vs. bad 100; privatization of 3–4; rural– urban maid 100–103 intimate strangers see maids Jacka, Tamara 111 Jankowiak, William 1, 6, 8, 161 Jeffreys, Elaine 115 Jenkins, Henry 233 Jia Baoyu 2 Jia Pingwa 101; Ruined City 101, 102 Jiang Guangci 11 Jiang Xin 249 Jiangsu TV 26–27, 30 Jianjiang Literature City website 63 Jiao Jian 84 Jin Feng 67, 227 Journey of Flower, The 12 Journey to the West 125 Kang Liu 231, 232 kinship 5 Kipnis, Andrew 181 Kleinman, Arthur 2 Kong, Shuyu 93, 235 Korkman, Zeynep Kurtulus 172 Kraeuter, Uwe 186–187 Kuo, Bea Hayden 207, 207, 211–214 labour: changing forms 170; informalization 170; see also emotional labour; sexual division of labour Labourers’ Centre 115 Lantheo 235 Lee, Haiyan 14, 66, 208, 230 leftover men 122–124 leftover women (shengnü) 7, 44–45 Lei, Wei 50

Levine, Jessica 145 Li Jie 87 Li Lan 101; Crowds of Maids 101 Li Luzhou 209 Li Shuang 186 Li, Xuan 6, 161 Li Yuchun 17, 158, 244–255, 2015 CCTV Spring Gala 251–253; androgyny 251, 253–255; fandom 245; sexual identity 244–255; singledom and 244–255; ‘One Night in Beijing’ 250 Li Zhaozheng 101; The Maid 101 Li Zongwu 56 Li, Eva 245 Lian Si 86 Liang Hong 94; China in Liang Village 94; Leaving Liang Village 94 Liang Shanbo 2 Liang Xiaosheng 135–136 Liaoning Folk Art Ensemble 138 life politics 7 Lin Bai 102; Farewell, Home Northwards to Beijing 102; A Record of Women’s Chatting 102 Lin Daiyu 2 Lin, Rocky 250 Lin Xiaodong 114, 122 Liu Jia 252 Liu Jiahui 250 Liu Liu 88, 90–91; see also Double-Sided Adhesive Tape Liu Qing 95 Liu Qingbang 101; Maids in Beijing 101 Lofter 226 Louie, Kam 118, 161 Love and Producer 14 love stories 2; contemporary China 12; Cultural Revolution 11; history in China 8–11; Ming dynasty 9–10; Qing dynasty 9; post-Mao China 11–15; stateauthorized narratives 2; see also internet literature Loving You is Non-Negotiable 88 Lu Yao 83, 87; Life 83, 87 Luo Luo 154 Lv Haojiji 215 Ma Nuo 25, 26–27, 31–32, 38–39 Mahmood, Saha 65 Maid, The 103, 104, 105, 106, 107–108, 109, 111 Maid II, The 104 Maid and the Security Guard, The 103, 104, 105–106, 108, 109–110, 111

Index   261 maids (baomu) 16, 97–112; focus of TV shows about 103–106; intimacy 100–103; intimate strangers 97–98; literary representations 100; marriage with urban men 103; recruitment 99; reform era 98–100; relationship with female employers 101–102, 110–111; relationship with male employers 100–101, 110–111; return to countryside 111; role 99–100; romantic love and 106–108; situation of 99; threshold figures 110 male infidelity 62–79; forms 63; chugui (derailment) 63; taking action against 64, 77 Mandarin Duck and Butterfly school 227, 229 Mao Dun 230 marriage: class formation 32–33; contemporary anxiety about 25; deinstitutionalization 6; heterosexual 6, 13; hypergamy (marrying up) 45–46; impact of traditional gender roles 93; inter-country 7, 185–202; inter-racial 7; male insecurity about 15, 31–34; marrying up 196; matched 88–89; mismatched 91; modern ideal 25; official view 27–30; path to adulthood 39, 45, 246; personal choice 28; political economy 32; privatization of 45; production of class 25–42; traditional Chinese view 8–9; trans-regional 6; see also international romance; phoenix men; rural–urban marriage Marriage Law of 1950 27–28, 45; see also women’s equality Marriage Law of 1981 29–30 Marriage Law of 2001 195 masculinity: archetypes 118–120; chengjia liye 120; chiku nailao (diligence) 119–120; dominant 118; dream lovers 118; marry a good wife 118, 120; ideal 118; new models 160–161; perceived threat to 113–130; subaltern workingclass 117–120; traditional male chauvinism 120–122; wenming ren (good civilized men) 118; see also bachelorhood matchmaking 7–8, 44 materialism see consumerism May Fourth Movement 157; New Culture Movement 208 Me Being an Emperor in the Qing Dynasty 115, 122, 123

media: transformation of Chinese 136–137 Mencius 8 Messerschmidt, James 118, 126 migrant workers (nongmin gong) 86; see also rural-to-urban migration; rural– urban inequality mistresses 62 Mo Huanjing 97; nanny arson case 97, 98 Mo Yan 11 mobility: geographical 7; social 37 Mockmockmock 233, 240 model operas 135 moral agency 64, 65 moral grammar 3 moral practice 65 nanny arson case 97, 98 Nardi, Bonnie 171 National College Entrance Examination: ant tribes 86; proletarianization of college graduates 86; restoration 86 national husband (guomin laogong) 16, 205–225; manufacturing of 211–222; queer connotations 206–207; tomboys as 218–222; transgender 214–218; see also Acrush, Zhang Tian’ai, Bea Hayden Kuo National Husband (TV show) 206 neoliberalism 3, 55; China’s selective embrace 5; under socialist rule 5 New Age of Marriage 83, 88, 89; novel version 93–94; patriarchal thinking 91–93 new model woman 187 Nie Er 230 Ning Jing 193 Nong Jia Le 138 Northwest Wind-style Culture 136 Occidentalism 185–186, 188, 191, 194, 196 Ode to Joy series 12, 13 one-child policy 44, 49, 50, 122, 196; see also leftover men one-on-one relationships 4, 13 online literature 13, 153; women’s literary websites 15 Open Door reforms 29, 34m 36 Osburg, John 62 Ought to Sing 235 patriarchal system 2, 3, 91–93 Peach and Plum Blossoms in Spring Breeze 236

262   Index Peach Girl, The 135 Pearl River Delta: high number of women 124 Peng, Yinni 114 personal freedom 3 phoenix men 16, 83–96; definition 83; origins 83; as ‘urban locusts’ 88–91; see also rural-urban inequality polygamy 8 post-1980s generation of writers 151–167 pre-marital sex 29 precarious employment 125–126; see also rural migrant men; rural-to-urban migration; rural–urban inequality privatization 3–4, 29 Professor Tian and His Twenty-Eight Maids 103, 104–105, 106–107, 108–109, 111 Professor Tian and His Twenty-Eight Relatives 103 Professor Tian and His Twenty-Eight Tenants 103 public space: new forms 14; new uses 14 Qi Jin Nian 154 Qi Tongwei 83, 84–85 Qian Zhongshu 11 Qianyi Yu 238–239 Qidian 153; Girls’ Channel 153–154 qing 9–10 Qiong Yao 63–64; links to adultery 67; Qiong Yao fever 66; see also Writing against Qiong Yao queer online female fantasies 16, 205–225; see also same-sex romance queer studies 6, 16–17; forms of queer love in China 209 Radway, Janice 77 re-embedding 7; see also dis-embedding Reaching the Same Goal Through Different Paths 235 Red Classics 11–12, 228, 232; see also revolution-plus-love Red Sister in Law, The 232 Red Sorghum 136, 137, 193 Regis, Pamela 133, 139–140 relationship experts 7, 15, 43–61, 72; abuse of science 50–52; husbandhunting manuals 15, 49; love storm workshops 43; see also sociobiology responsibility and love 30–31 revolution-plus-love 10–11, 12, 110, 226, 228–231

Rocha, Leon 208 Rofel, Lisa 3–4, 45, 118, 136 romantic love: consumption and 1; definition 1; elusive nature 12; outside marriage 9; sex and 1 rural migrant men 16: emasculation of 113–130; role of Confucianism 114, 118–120; role of cyberspace 115–116, 126–127; sexual health 115; sexual and romantic relationships 115; social exclusion 114 rural migrant women 7, 8; mobile phones and 114; see also maids rural romantic love stories 133–150; revolutionary 135 Rural Romantic Love Stories (TV show) 16, 133–134, 138–145, 146 rural-to-urban migration 62, 83–96, 98–99, 113–114 rural–urban inequality 15, 84–88, 94–95, 103, 113–114; impact on relationships 15–16; see also phoenix men; rural migrant men; rural migrant women rural–urban marriage 88; see also phoenix men Sa Kongkong 74–77 same-sex romance 9, 16–17, 208; Chinese public imaginaries 207; female 157; tongzing ai 208 Sang Tze-lan 208 scholar–beauty (caizi jiaren) romance 9–10 Sentinels under the Neon Lights 95 sex: and love 1; for pleasure 6; as revolutionary deconstruction 11; subcultures 6 sex industry: Dongguan as sex capital 120–121; see also virtual lovers sexual division of labour 48; see also emotional labour Shen Congwen 135; see also Xiao Xiao Shen Danping 186–187 Shen Yilun 217 Shi Ke 193 Sima Xiangru 9 singledom in contemporary China 244–255 Sinocentrism 194 Siqin Gaowa 193 Suowei Xiao 62 social factory 16, 168, 170, 173 social identity: new forms 14 sociobiology 47–50, 72

Index   263 socioeconomic inequality 3 Song of Youth 239 speaking bitterness: historical meaning 69–70; as literary practice 64, 68–73, 77 Spy War on Shanghai Bund 226 Stafford, Charles 30 State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) 210, 218, 226 Story of Liubao Village, The 135 Su, Gang 115 Su Shi 161; ‘Memories of the Past at Red Cliff’ 161 Su Tong 11 subject positions: changing formations 14 successology 55: twisted female 43, 55–58, 59 Sun Huifen 102, 103; The Maid 103; Woman Lin Fen and Woman Xiaomi 102 Sun, Wanning 50, 97–98, 110 sweet stories 14 Tales of Hulan River 135 Tang Jun 113–114, 124 Tang Xianzu 10; The Peony Pavilion 10 Tangqi Gongzi 12; To the Sky Kingdom 12 technological change 14; see also digitalization thick black theory 56 Third Sister Liu 135 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement 190 Tiny Times 151, 155–158, 161, 163, 207, 211; issues of femininity 157 Tokyo Girls Picture Book 13 tomboy (t) styles 218–222, 244–255 Under the Banyan Tree website 155 Undercover 228, 231, 237 V2, 220–221 video games 14; see also Me Being an Emperor in the Qing Dynasty Virno, Paulo 175 virtual lovers (xuni lianren) 168–184; emotional satisfaction 176–178; exploitation 178–179; female clients 169; motivation 176–177; privacy 179–180; recruitment 174; training 174–175 virtuous wife and good mother (xianqi liangmu) 53–54, 58

Wallis, Cara 114 Wang Aiguo 100; Maid Du Xiaowu 100, 103 Wang Ban 230 Wang Baoqiang 95 Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang 135 Wang Hailing 88, 103; New Age of Marriage 103 Wang Liping 99, 104 Wang Meng 139 Wang Sicong 206 Wang, David Der-Wei 11 Wanggui and Anna 88 Wei Hui 11–12, 154; Shanghai Baby 154 Weiqing Hospital 72 Western Wing, The 9 Western worshipping 189 White Haired Girl 135 Who is National Husband? 206 Wilson, Edward O. 48, 49 Woledge, Elizabeth 237 Women in Beijing 13 Women in Shanghai 13 women: limited agency 7; see also leftover women; rural migrant women women’s equality 27–28 women’s literary websites see internet literature Women’s Secrets 213 workplace socialization 3 Writing against Qiong Yao 63–64, 66–68, 77, 227 Wu Lijun 90 Xi Jinping 126 Xiang Xiaomi 100; Erde 100, 101 xiangqin (gathering in parks) fairs 5, 33–39 xianqi liangmu see virtuous wife and good mother xianxia (immortal beings) genre 12 Xiao Hong 135 Xi Jinping 5 Xin Tue Tuan 250 Xu Yajun 83 Yan Dandan 252 Yan Fengying 236 Yan, Hairong Yan 101–102, 137, 101–102, 137 Yan, Yunxiang 4, 180 Yang Bingyang 46, 47, 53; emotion work 53–54; optimal family model 53; Relationship Thick Black Theory 57;

264   Index Yang Bingyang continued ‘scientific’ claims 48–52; The Secret of Perfect Relationships 56–57; see also relationship experts; virtuous wife and good mother Yang, Ling 245, 249 Yang Mi 211 Yang Mo 229; Song of Youth 229, 230 Yau Ching 255; ‘Dreaming of Normal While Sleeping with Impossible’ 255 Yearning 136 Yellow Earth 136 yiyin 213–214 youth literature 152–153, 154 Yu Menglong 217 Yuan Shu 229, 235–236 Zeng Yike 213 zeren (sense of responsibility) 30, 37–38

Zhang Jiajia 151, 155, 158, 161, 162, 163; fandom 162; ‘I’m Liu Dahei’ 162; see also I Belonged to You Zhang Jie 11; Love Must Not Be Forgotten 11 Zhang Kangkang 102; Lodger, The 102 Zhang, Li 38 Zhang Tian’ai 207, 214–218 Zhang Tielin 193 Zhang Youfang 220 Zhang Yueran 154 Zhao Benshan 95, 138 Zhao Huanan 104, 105–106 Zhao Shuli 11: Xiao Erhei’s Marriage 11 zhongxing (gender neutrality) 245 Zhou Meisen 85 Zhou, Bichang53 Zhu Yingtai 2 Zhuo Wenjun 9