Abstract
Urban Politics and Cultural Capital: The Case of Chinese Opera, by Ma Haili, explores the place of yueju, a specific type of Chinese opera, within contemporary Chinese society. The author, a PhD from the University of Leeds and director of the University of Chester China Centre, was a professional yueju performer. She explains the social forces behind the decline of this form of art, taking into account the political and economic specificities of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (p. 17). And she does so by getting deep into the cultural and aesthetic transformations of the largest state yueju house in the country, the Shanghai Yueju Company (SYC). Her double affiliation with the artistic and the academic world provides her with a unique opportunity for developing an ethnographic study, based on interviews, observation, and the author’s personal experience. This book will be of use to academics, cultural policy-makers, and art curators as well as students of the arts and humanities.
The author states in the introduction that in order to understand her object of study she had to pay attention to a subject that she had been avoiding all her life: politics. She explains the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), both at the state and regional levels, as instigator of the process of marketization. With a comprehensive and reflexive ambition, the book is structured in six thematic chapters. The first chapter, “Tradition and Modern Opera Productions,” is a descriptive account of the changes that have shaped institutionalized Chinese opera. Following the analysis of art worlds by sociologist Howard Becker (1984), she efficiently uses the terms convention, innovation, and distribution to explain the rise of the Institutional Actor Theatre as a new model of urban opera production.
Chapters Two and Three, “Art Institution Management” and “Which Market to Serve? Party-State or Audience?” constitute the kernel of the book. Haili applies Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the art field to the complex cultural reality of China. The author shows how Chinese opera exemplifies the changes occurring within the CCP and its cultural policy. In Bourdieusian terms, she reconstructs the rocky road to the current legitimacy of SYC as an artistic institution. The reader gets a clear picture of the interweaving between art and politics that comes with the two-step process of marketization in the post-Mao era.
Yueju was one of the key ideological tenets of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and so performers were close to the CCP. Some were actual members of the Party and occupied a high-status position because of their political capital. From 1984 to 1989, the CCP aimed to revive the traditional style of yueju, which the author describes as a cloned style of production (p. 46), alienating younger audiences. The political instrumentalization of this first period was followed by a second phase of marketization, from 1992 to 2012, where the driving force was not explicitly ideological but economic. Through managerial changes, the SYC had to apply for funding, and a middle-aged generation of performers took the lead. Still, the award system appointed by the state favored “avoiding the modern theme” (p. 72), censoring topics related to political and socio-cultural conflicts. The internal struggle within the art field to get public funding created a shift from ideological control to market pressure. The author attributes the current lack of artistic value and success of yueju to the political and economic manipulation of the production sphere by state-funded institutions. Interestingly, she describes the consequences of marketization as being a double bind for performers that are required both to please the audience and to meet the ideological requirements of their state patrons.
The last three chapters dwell on more specific dimensions of the process of marketization. Chapter Four, “Yueju Distinction under Urbanization,” describes the decentralization of state power that increases the power of regional authorities. Haili compares two models of cultural policy: the Grand Shanghai Theater with expensive tickets, a program with little space for Yueju plays, and a target audience with a “taste of luxury” (p. 86); and the Zhejiang regional cultural policy where indigenous opera such as Yueju thrives. The cause for Shanghai’s politics of distinction, in Bourdieu’s terms, is that the government controls follow the market. In Haili’s words, this urbanization “greatly damages people’s habitus and limits their taste” (p. 94).
Chapter Five, “Performativity and Femininity,” puts forward the patriarchal framework of the first female-only yueju contest on television, which brought fame to young female performers but also reproduced a dominated gender identity around femininity. Finally, Chapter Six, “Yueju and the Media,” identifies television and the Internet as the two main socializing agents of contemporary China. The author claims that while television reproduces and consolidates the political and ideological power of the state, reaching the less-educated population, alternative cultural production and identities are possible, such as the micro-production of contemporary yueju on university campuses or the visibility of bloggers and fandom on the Internet. Still, Haili is well aware that censorship is active on the web and that the resistance against marketization is dependent on the cultural capital of citizens.
The data, collected from 2005 to 2010, were centered specifically on the SYC institution. While the methodology is stated at the beginning of the book as being ethnographic and qualitative, the use of actual quoting is scarce and the overall validity of the book is at times weak. The author reflects on her double condition as a researcher and performer: the advantages of being familiar with the setting were met with challenges. Interviewees assumed a taken-for-granted knowledge that they thought they shared with the interviewer, leading to ambiguous or incomplete answers. This difficulty, linked with her emotional attachment to the object of study, appears all through the book. Her aesthetic judgments on a given production, or her reflections on Chinese social structure or the class background of the audience, would require stronger backup from empirical data, such as more excerpts from the existing interviews, transcribed field notes, or secondary databases.
In all, this case study of the process of marketization of Chinese opera as a cultural product combines deep theoretical thought with empirical data that are hard to obtain. Haili gives a detailed and easy to read account of 100 years of history of a Chinese cultural production. It is a book of high value for social scientists looking for the application of Bourdieu and Becker’s theory of art to new empirical domains. This book brings you a little closer to understanding the Chinese art market and its cultural policy.