Love Stories in China

The Politics of Intimacy in the Twenty-First Century

Wanning Sun, Ling Yang, Wanning Sun, Ling Yang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000497236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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 of China over the last four decades has impacted the micro lives of ordinary Chinese people.

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 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.

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 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).

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 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: love stories in contemporary China
• PART I: Marriage in trouble
• PART II: Rural–urban inequality
• PART III: Gender, race and class
• PART IV: Queer voices
• Index