Of Menace and Mimicry

Voices of the Nation

While global media play a tangible and highly influential role in constructing images of the nation-state, other significant voices also contribute to these representations, providing alternative and sometimes conflicting accounts of national value and status. Internationally, the educated elite assume a central position in articulating public concepts of the nation (Boyer and Lomnitz, 2005). This article turns to this sector of China’s population, examining how young, educated Chinese disputed the “China threat theory” (weixielun) through invoking the 2008 Beijing Olympic games. They suggested that the 2008 Olympics would showcase the nation’s glories to mitigate global perceptions that China’s growing economic and political importance was a menace to the well-being of the global community. Particularly important in these narratives was the role of the Olympics opening ceremony in demonstrating both China’s splendors and its intended harmonious approach to international affairs.

Chinese youth protests over unfavorable representations of the nation-state have met globally with accusations of “zealous nationalism” (“China’s New Nationalists Revealed,” 2008; see also Osnos, 2008) and “nationalistic fervor” (Zhao, 2008: 48). Indeed the praise the young Chinese featured in this article layered on China reflected a strong nationalist sentiment. However, the negotiations evident in the content and tone of these students’ and young professionals’ discussions about the Beijing Olympics reveal a complicated and contradictory process of identity construction that despite being framed through one of the world’s most nationalistic public events, renders the nation more than the sum of its citizens’ nationalist endeavors. While these citizens promoted China as a modern cosmopolitan state, legitimate as a global power for its similarity to Western, consumer-oriented forms of modernity, they also promoted “traditional” forms of Chinese culture in a parallel claim to acceptability. ⁵ Likewise, while they endorsed particular cultural forms as an antidote to perceptions of a China threat, they were frequently critical when the government engaged in similar promotions.

One of the most important aspects of the complex national identity construction of these students and professionals relates to their desires for China to attain the same sort of consumer-based, free-market modernity Japan and Korea had shown to the world through their Olympics decades earlier, and for China’s Olympics to demonstrate this modernity to the global public. To understand both these desires for sameness and how they function to maintain hierarchies of economic, political, and cultural influence, this article turns to theories of mimicry. Mimicry, Homi Bhabha notes, is “one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (1984: 126; see also Anderson, 1991). Emerging nations are “haunted,” argues Benedict Anderson (1998), by the inevitability of evaluating and constructing national value against established global standards for belonging that privilege the dominant domestic practices and values of ascendant nations (Dirlik, 2008; Ferguson, 2002; Modleski 1999; Munasinghe, 2002; Rofel 2007). Haunted by this desire for what they do not have, less-powerful nations mimic the practices of powerful nations to gain access to greater authority and status.

Theories of mimicry suggest that emerging nations whose practices and values begin to reach standards of global belonging are perceived as a threat by those in power. The ability of these emerging nations to obtain power through imitation, to truly threaten extant hierarchies of power, is, however, limited by a “culturalizing” process (Ferguson, 2002) in which the political/economic/ritual culture of the lesser player is represented as hindering its ability to obtain parity. Global discussions about China, for example, often “culturalize” the nation to justify disempowering practices, its “crony” capitalism, gender bias, or “authoritarian” culture rendering true parity impossible (“China’s Itchy-Footed Rich,” 2011; “Gendercide,” 2010: 11; Halper, 2010). Greater powers thus encourage “cultural assimilation while denying social integration” (Cripps, 1977; cited in Modleski, 1999: 209) in a manner that maintains static global hierarchies of power and influence. Cultural differences allow Westernization but prevent Western identity, concede modernization but preclude modernity. Imitators can only become “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, 1984: 127, emphasis in the original).

The desires for similarity expressed in the Olympics narratives of students and young professionals in China reveal much about how mimicry functions to maintain hierarchies of power. At the same time, however, a close ethnographic examination of these desires exposes how their lived complexities and contradictions reveal the limits of mimicry, highlighting how its perceived power is predicated upon insider/outsider divisions of social and political hierarchy that are slowing transforming. The “imitations” and desires for sameness of these young adults are complicated by their celebrations of the distinctiveness of Chinese culture. They are also complicated by a current historical moment in which difference might be a space of progress rather than backwardness and by the possibility that China’s difference has the potential to undermine mimicry’s role in sustaining global hierarchies of power. This examination of Olympics narratives thus reveals and reinforces the Olympics’ position as a diagnostic event. This event not only provides the public space for the articulation of constructions of the nation, but also provides the public space for the articulation of debates over the changing position of China in the global hierarchy of power.

Methods

This article is based on ethnographic and textual research begun in July 2001 when I arrived in Beijing shortly after the International Olympic Committee awarded the games to China. Ethnographic research methods included participant observation and focus group, semi-structured and unstructured interviews with Chinese urban high school, college, and graduate students and young professionals. These occurred in Kunming during the summer of 2006 and in Beijing during the summers of 2007 and 2008. ⁶ Participant-observation research included visits to Olympics venues, Olympics cultural festivals, and museum exhibits, as well as attendance at an Olympics policy conference in Beijing. In Kunming, I held focus group interview sessions with one class of approximately thirty high school juniors at a key high school attached to the main provincial university; one group of five undergraduate students at a teachers college; and one group of four graduate students at the provincial university. ⁷ Each focus group session lasted approximately two hours. I was able to meet with several members of this last group for more extensive follow-up interviews. In addition, I conducted shorter, informal interviews with several young professionals whose training and careers ranged from electrical engineering to middle-school teaching. Semi-formal interviews in Beijing included eight single-session, in-depth individual interviews, ranging from one to three hours with college students from several local universities; four multiple-session, in-depth interviews with graduate students and young professionals; and a one-hour focus group session with four undergraduate students that continued through an evening-long discussion about the Olympics over dinner. ⁸ During these semi-structured focus group and individual interview sessions, I began discussions with a formal interview guide of questions that were open-ended enough to allow respondents to draw upon personal experience but closed-ended enough to allow data comparison between different individuals. In this article, I focus on conversations from two of the group interview sessions and with several specific individuals to provide for a full range of both representation and particularity. The textually based research in this article includes analysis of English- and Chinese-language documents such as official Olympics newsletters, advertising campaigns, Chinese blogs, and newspaper articles. I analyzed these data through conceptual coding and examining textual and narrative structure with the primary goal of understanding the geopolitical and historical context of China’s Olympic games. This cohort’s evaluations of China offer a valuable perspective on the nature of China’s role in the global community. Their simultaneously assertive and tentative self-representations mirror, in both interesting and uncanny ways, China’s rapidly transforming relationship to international hierarchies of authority and position.

Revolution and Bound Feet

I had only been in China a few days in the summer of 2006 when I was sidelined with the question, “Why do you think we’re a threat?” I had begun the summer’s research in Kunming, a medium-sized city in southwestern China where I had lived and worked periodically since the mid-1980s. I contacted a friend and colleague from the provincial university who introduced me to several of her graduate students, who in turn introduced me to undergraduate students from two colleges in town. That afternoon, I had arranged to meet with five students from the local teachers college located across the ring road from my apartment. The conversation that ensued set the tone for several of the most important aspects of the Olympics narratives of these young Chinese. First, it established how important the Olympic games were to constructions of national identity, both domestically and globally. Second, it revealed the importance of narratives of similarity in establishing national legitimacy and negating perceptions of a China threat.

My conversation with these students began with Bi Yalan, a student from Kunming, explaining the Olympics logos and emblems and discussing the Olympics educational activities that were beginning to appear at elementary and secondary schools across the nation. ⁹ She noted that the main logo for the Olympics, a white figure set against a solid red background, was shaped like the character for “culture” (wen), but then paused and added that “it also looks a bit like the character for ‘capital’ (jing) as in Beijing. And it also looks like an athlete.” Bi noted proudly that this symbol “combined ancient culture and modern technology,” paused, smiled, and added, “Plus, it’s red, an auspicious color.”

I asked Bi how she thought the Olympics were going to help China and she responded that they would help Chinese communicate with foreigners, acquire new languages, learn how to face crises (she referred to the bombings at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics), and benefit China economically. “Lots of people will be doing business in China, so this will help develop China.” At this point, Bi switched to how the Olympics would help the global community understand China. “The Olympics will help spread Chinese culture around the world and help people to understand Chinese culture and China. This will help [the world] understand China more deeply.”

Bi’s words set off a flood of commentary from her fellow students who appeared far less concerned about what China would gain from the Olympics than what foreigners would learn about China. Xu Bingwen, a young graduate student from a rural suburb, offered comments that are worth quoting at length as their general objective and impressions were repeated often by my informants over subsequent years.

In some foreigners’ eyes, they think that China is a threat to the world. The Olympics will help them to lessen this idea of threat and see that China has a developed economy. Then they can understand Chinese culture and we can understand each other. The Olympics will give the world a new view of China. So many people have never been here before. They only know of China through the media. This isn’t the real China. What the foreigners see is all very negative, or very exoticized, like all that stuff about bound feet. They think that this is China. Or they think that it’s all about revolution. Revolution and bound feet.

I later followed up on this conversation with graduate student Huang Chuntao. “How” I asked, “were people going to reflect differently on China after attending the Olympics?” as Xu had suggested. Huang responded,

When people get to Beijing for the Olympics, it will change their minds about what China is. The traditional culture that people thought they understood before they come here isn’t visible, for example the clothes, the buildings. What they will see is that we are just like they are. They will see us the same way as they see themselves. It’s no different. The clothes we wear are the same. The cars we drive are the same. Beijing has lots of expensive, imported cars; Beijing has lots of skyscrapers, just like New York. At first glance people will just think it’s just like New York.

Huang’s and Xu’s protestations of similarity—to being developed and just like New York—whose “truth” was to be visually experienced through the Olympics, reflect a classic strategy of mimicry in which lesser powers imitate the practices and values of greater powers in order to improve their status, to claim the “rights of full membership” (Ferguson, 2002: 555) in a world in which capitalist, economic prowess is one of the dominant standards for belonging. As an erstwhile lesser player, whose citizens experienced decades of material deprivation, China adopts the economic market practices and consumerist values of dominant nations, undergoes rapid economic expansion, joins the World Trade Organization, bids successfully for the Olympic games, and consequently joins the ranks of powerful, legitimate world leaders. In fact, it was China’s rapid market privatization and dramatic economic growth that rendered the Beijing Olympic games both initially conceivable and ultimately achievable. By many indices, China is already a major “player at the table” (Zoellick, 2005), a full participant in, as the Olympics slogan suggests, the “One World, One Dream” of development defined by a nation’s practices of capital accumulation and expenditure, with little need to reassert its similarity for legitimacy.

Although Xu and Huang maintained that these games would allow China to showcase its economic modernity as a marker of common cause, China’s attempts to improve its status through similarity have often been perceived as a menace. China’s economic “miracle,” which blends market capitalism with a single-party, state ideology of socialism, presents a challenge to the ideologies of liberal democracy. If the “free choice” of liberal democracy is not a prerequisite for market success, might a global public increasingly threatened by economic recession begin to question its value? Indeed, as Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak note,

Socialism is normally described today as a perverse remnant of modern authoritarianism, most often invoked as a scare tactic for disciplining citizens into the conviction that there is no alternative to the contemporary late-liberal, capitalist order that would not be a thousand times worse. (2010: 180)

Huang and Xu’s narratives defined similarity and global belonging through access to the consumer object—the cars, the clothes, the skyscrapers. Such assertions of global identity through consumption are not unique to China. Studies of modernization around the world reveal how consumption has emerged in the contemporary era as a dominant marker of cosmopolitanism and global belonging (Appadurai, 2000; Hubbert, 2003; Besnier, 2004; Nelson, 2000; Rofel, 2007). Yet, the words of these students indicated more than mere exterior commonality, for they also articulated a similarity of value in which China’s consumer prosperity signaled its support for a global market economy, despite the government’s explicitly socialist political framework. Their assertions of similarity offered a “safe socialism” whose massive economic growth was driven by the desire for designer footwear rather than nuclear missiles, one that supported the practices and ideals of consumer-driven free market competition rather than the “unnatural” and “unfair” results of planned economies and egalitarian politics. ¹⁰

Mimicry is effective in reinforcing hierarchies of power because the standards that symbolize and constitute that power remain contingent (culturally, politically, economically) enough that nations striving to reach them can never quite attain complete equivalence. Global Olympics media commentary made this evident, reminding China that despite its efforts to use the Olympics to showcase its similarity, it remained “almost the same, but not quite.” China’s Olympics public campaigns to educate its citizens on global behavioral expectations for such practices as queuing, expectorating, and trash disposal, for example, were jumped upon with glee by the Western press, in tacit acknowledgment of China’s “backwardness.” ¹¹ As a U.S. correspondent inquired, “What if foreign visitors are forced to navigate a minefield of saliva left by local pedestrians spitting on sidewalks? What if lines at Olympic events dissolve into scrums as local residents jump to the head of pack? What if Chinese fans serenade rival teams with the guttural, unprintable ‘Beijing curse’?” (Yardley, 2007).

The visual record of the games often presented parallel juxtapositions of modernistic skyscrapers resting against traditionally curved rooftops or construction rubble, or of weather-beaten men pedaling rickety three-wheeled carts, piled high with live chickens, down neon-lit pedestrian shopping zones advertising Prada, Rolex, and Burberry products. Thus, even though China’s citizens wore Prada and Rolex, they still expectorated on the sidewalks, failed to queue properly, and ate scorpion kebabs as an afternoon snack (Wansell, 2008). Through such taming, membership in the global community becomes “culturalized” (Ferguson, 2002: 559; Hubbert, forthcoming [2014]) in ways that render the similarity of consumer-driven, capitalist economic development insufficient for full belonging, leaving the standards for power and hierarchy secure as disciplinary tools of order.

The Color Red

During the summer I was in Kunming, I was invited to hold an English-language discussion of the Olympics—covered by the local media— with a class of juniors at the high school associated with the university where I lived.

What began as a stilted English-language recitation of official representations of the Olympics, quickly became—once the reporters departed—a lively, Chinese-language debate over the value of the Olympics and the legitimacy of global representations of China. The change of tone was marked by the first post-media topic when a young man, Zhou Chanming, asked me whether I thought China could produce “really smart people.” Before I had a chance to answer, he followed with, “Then why hasn’t it produced a Nobel Prize winner?” A sideways glance from the class teacher and giggles from his fellow students failed to deter his questioning and Zhou spent the rest of the afternoon, both during our group discussion and afterward when he approached me to continue the conversation, countering his fellow students and engaging me with sharp questions about my position and that of the West. I recount select segments of this conversation for what they reveal about the important role of culture in these Olympic narratives, especially how it has the potential to represent both national stagnation and national liberation. It was this latter possibility—the interpretation of Chinese culture as future-oriented rather than backward—that marked the emerging role of “difference” in shifting hierarchies of global power.

A discussion of the three official themes of the Beijing Olympics (the High-Technology Olympics, the Green Olympics, and the People’s Olympics) launched our group conversation. The students quickly explained and moved on from the first two themes, and then spent considerable time discussing what exactly defined the People’s Olympics. ¹²

The theme of the People’s Olympics provides a good chance to show Chinese culture to the world, to make the world know about Chinese culture. It will also bring other cultures to China and let Chinese people see how others live. A great deal of Chinese culture will be on display for the Olympics. The color red for one. This is a symbol of Chinese culture. It’s an auspicious color, but it also shows how Chinese culture is cheerful, friendly, happy and warm. People will also be able to experience Chinese food—we have a lot of delicious food. But they will also see how Chinese people are different, how they show respect for their parents, teachers and elders. China is different from other places. It has a very long history; it definitely has the longest history of all the Olympic cities. When people get to Beijing, they will see a mix of the modern and the traditional; this is China.

At this point the class monitor, a young man named Li Zhi, began to discuss this mix of the contemporary and the ancient.

Beijing was an important capital during the Qing and Ming dynasties. There are still lots of old, traditional buildings that are symbols of these dynasties. But much of this is being torn down for the Olympics. . . . Our fear is that people [foreigners] won’t like the old houses. Even when they have been converted to hotels [foreigners will feel] they aren’t modern enough, that they won’t be that comfortable or have modern conveniences and that this will reproduce feelings about the backwardness of China.

When I asked Li where foreigners received such impressions about the “backwardness of China,” he responded,

People get these impressions a lot from movies. Like the Zhang Yimou movies. They see all these beautiful actresses in the movies and think that this is China. Zhang Yimou has long been criticized for showing all these ugly things about China. He shows the problems, the dark side.

Li’s comments provoked a tense discussion among the students about Zhang Yimou. Arguably China’s most globally acclaimed film director, Zhang had also been appointed director of the 2008 Olympics opening and closing ceremonies. Zhou, who had earlier questioned me about the Nobel Prize, jumped in. “He should show this side of China. Citizens have a right to know the conditions. We can’t only know the positive side of things. If we know the problems, then we can fix them.”

Li responded,

Yes, but he exaggerates these things on purpose. He does this for a foreign audience. He exoticizes the problem and then it seems that this is all there is of China. Foreign audiences are looking for this. It’s what they expect. When people come here [for the Olympics], they will see a lot of modern things and this will surprise people who are used to the Zhang Yimou representation of China.

As will be discussed later, discussions about Zhang Yimou took a different turn after the opening ceremonies, but before then, Li’s words were common ones. A long conversation about the Olympics with Xu, the graduate student from Kunming, included several similar observations about Zhang’s films and their representations of China. Xu had earlier been discussing the iconic Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, expressing her distaste for the design, “It’s hideous,” and the selection of a non-Chinese architect, “These foreign architects just don’t understand our design traditions.” At that point she jumped to the topic of Zhang Yimou to express relief.

It’s great that there is a Chinese director [of the opening ceremony]. . . . All the people in the ceremony will be Chinese, they will put on a performance that is full of Chinese characteristics, like taiji, martial arts. These are traditional Chinese practices . . . that can show the world something special about Chinese society.

She paused at this point, however, and changed direction.

Well, Zhang Yimou was not a good choice as the director. His films, well, they lack something. . . . The images are very mechanical. . . . They don’t capture reality. His films are not so popular here. . . . He is good at making beautiful scenes, but the early films revealed the ugly aspect of Chinese culture to foreigners. It seemed that this was the only aspect of China that people [foreigners] would see. This was a very shallow representation of China. The deeper ideas about Chinese culture were never represented. The films should show deeper ideas about Confucianism and Daoism. Visually [in the films], China gets represented by the Great Wall and the Terra Cotta Warriors. This is made-up Chinese culture, not real Chinese culture. He needs to show a more complete picture. The impressions that people get from his films are that China is very backward, that people aren’t open-minded, that they are very narrow minded. Lots of people will say that he made those films just to show the ugly sides of China, to attract foreigner’s attention . . . [and] earn foreign movie awards.

Zhang Yimou’s films are known internationally for their opulent representations of Chinese culture—abundant use of the color red, sumptuous banquets, mystical rites, and multigenerational households. The color red can, as the high school students noted above, indicate cultural exhilaration, whereas in contrast, Zhang’s brilliant scarlets reveal the metaphorical and literal blood of suicidal concubines (in Raise the Red Lantern) and oppressive, authoritarian regimes (in Red Sorghum). Whereas multigenerational households may represent the care and respect accorded to elders within the kin group, in Zhang Yimou films they are recast as a patriarchal power that is repressive, tyrannical, and authoritarian (as in Judou). ¹³

These students understood that what they might perceive as long-standing cultural symbols of respect, sophistication, peace, and value also played directly into classic, fetishized images of China circulating in the global market, in which the duration and depth of tradition are sometimes interpreted as stagnation and backwardness rather than temperance, modesty, and respect (Dirlik, 1997; Liu, 2001; Su and Wang, 1988). They were clearly aware of how the culturalizing processes of mimicry work, how what Homi Bhabha calls “metonymies of presence” (1984: 130), essentialized partial representations of identity, rendering attempts at sameness and thus equality frustratingly difficult. They grasped that juxtaposing scorpion snacks with skyscrapers might solidify rather than challenge extant structures of power.

Mimicry’s ability to maintain hierarchies of status depends on the perpetuation of essentialized visions of identity and on static geopolitical hierarchies. However, these young citizens were keenly aware of the shifting nature of contemporary global geopolitics. They were also aware that these conversations about threat and similarity were occurring within an international arena marked by an increase in competing theories and practices of modernity (Jacques, 2009; Nonini and Ong, 1997; Ong, 1997), and within which China’s experiences and practices were becoming increasingly attractive to developing nations around the globe (Brautigam, 2009; DeHart, 2012; Kurlantzick, 2007). As more nations around the world bypass Western-dominated institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and turn to China to bolster their development, one may envision how the “coming out” of the Olympics is not limited to the realm of athletic prowess. Indeed, this bypassing indicates a changing power field where being like New York may no longer portend power. In this case, difference represents growth rather than lack, suggesting a future of greatness for China rather than “modernity—not quite.”

Although the Olympics slogan “One World, One Dream” suggested the complementarity of economic growth, a second and equally ubiquitous slogan, “New Beijing, New Olympics,” hinted at the possibilities for a new world order in which structures and values other than those of current global hegemons provide alternative models for global belonging and praxis. In addition to constructing a narrative of safe socialism in which cars, clothes, and skyscrapers mark common cause and value, these students and young professionals also turned to difference as an antidote to menace. These Olympics were to reveal, in the words of a young Beijing reporter, not only the success of China’s marketization but also “how China is different from the world. This is the biggest fortune China can give to the world.”

The 2008 opening ceremonies were replete with the symbolic aesthetic for which Zhang’s earlier productions were renowned—brilliant colors, ancient drums, traditional ink paintings, dragons, and images of the Great Wall dominating the stage. A spectacular production of light, sound, and visual display, the “brilliantly conceived and staged opening ceremony attracted ‘gee-whiz’ coverage by newspapers around the world” (Moeller, 2008). Yet, such praise was rarely left as the definitive representation of the event. At the same time as this “gee-whiz” moment covered a “choreography of lights, music and actors [that] won China global admiration” (Moeller, 2008), it also posed the drummers and dragons, as noted in the introduction to this article, as “authoritarian” and “intimidating,” comparing the spectacle to Hitler’s grand moments of Nazi propaganda and displays of might. Alternatively, media frequently began with paeans to the program, as did the New York Times coverage, describing an “opening ceremony of soaring fireworks, lavish spectacle and a celebration of Chinese culture and international good will” (Yardley, 2008), but then launched into reports of pollution and “tightening security clampdown[s],” and commentary on human rights, code, as Rey Chow reminds us, for “what China is lacking” (Chow 2002: 20). Such representations perpetuated in the global discursive realm equations of symbolic culture with a devalued politics that marked China’s “essential” nature.

In contrast, the students and young professionals discussed here posited that the reappearance of such cultural attributes within a new geopolitical context was an occasion for celebration rather than censure. Faced with protestations to similarity that met with global indifference and even hostility, and with representations of Chinese culture as stagnant and potentially destructive, these individuals offered the global spectacle of the ceremonies as a space for reassessment and praise for difference. When I asked Fang Meizhen, a graduate student in sports sociology who volunteered at the Olympic games, why she changed her mind about director Zhang Yimou and his presentations of Chinese culture, she responded,

In the 2008 Olympics ceremony, under Zhang’s direction, we impressed the whole world. It absolutely met the needs of the Chinese. We showed our nation’s charms and were proud of them. I guess that’s why we changed our minds after the great ceremony.

Wang Baojia, a communications major in Beijing, spoke at length and with conviction about the positive role the Olympics would play in representing China to the world, repeatedly stressing how the 2008 opening ceremony was an encouraging move in the right direction. ¹⁴ One of the many who had earlier expressed dissatisfaction with the artistic endeavors of Zhang Yimou, he explained his change of heart:

To be honest, I didn’t have too much confidence in him. . . . But after I watched it, I thought the performance he gave to the world was wonderful. . . . My favorite parts of the opening ceremony were those that reflected traditional Chinese culture, particularly the Confucian Analects section, the Chinese brush painting and the zither. . . . The opening ceremony fully displayed China’s 5,000-year history. The goal . . . wasn’t about displaying how strong China is but showing the world that China’s culture and history are worth learning.

Culture for Wang Baojia was thus not a static, essentialized form of identity, but a live project whose meaning shifted alongside changing geopolitical contexts and their concomitant values. Within the Olympic spectacle, the same symbols that had previously been castigated as exoticized, essentialized, and “not real,” were redefined as glorious and global, giving China a chance at equivalence and belonging that, to these young Chinese, earlier Zhang Yimou representations had rendered seemingly impossible. This changing context also provided Wang with the opportunity to reject the fetishized and threatening motif of the fire-breathing dragon as a dominant symbol for the representation of China in lieu of an alternative difference—that of a cultural tradition of harmony—as an antidote to perceptions of Chinese threat.

One of the things I would like [the Olympics] to share with the world is [that] . . . China has a great deal of traditional cultural virtues. The dragon, which is a well-known image, is not the most important one in Chinese civilization and culture. Rather, China has had thousands of years of civilization marked by a culture of making friends with people all over the world. If foreigners understood this better, they would have fewer misunderstandings about China. Then they would not believe in this “China threat theory” that they subscribe to just because China is growing more powerful. Harmony is an important element in China’s culture. Whoever doesn’t understand that will believe in the China threat theory.

Harmony: Cultural Attribute or Government Slogan?

Many of the themes and symbols of cultural difference offered by these students and young professionals as antidotes to perceptions of Chinese threat were articulated in an essentialized language that reflects what Geremie Barmé felicitously calls “History Channel–friendly” Chinese culture (2008). History Channel–friendly cultural difference is defined by a range of behavioral traits and symbolic entrapments as typically “Chinese,” including the familiar trope of “Asian values” and the ubiquitous and customary array of dragons and pandas on glossy Western travel brochures advertising “Exotic Asia” (see Chow, 1995; Ong 1997; Wang, 2008). ¹⁵ In many ways, the cursory and superficial nature of such proclamations of cultural difference reveal little about the content of Chinese culture from the perspective of lived, everyday experience. However, the tactic of appealing to cultural difference as an antidote to threat speaks volumes to the tensions and ambiguities of China’s position as a socialist market economy on the global stage. What matters is not the definitional task of culture—what we call culture—but why students and young professionals instrumentalized Chinese culture to mitigate China’s image as threat and what role cultural difference plays on the global front to mediate hierarchies of power. The Olympics, a notionally apolitical mega-event with global scope, was to offer visitors and viewers a chance to experience China as a peaceful, respectful, and modest nation, not a nation of advanced weaponry, communism, and Chinese-held G8 debt. Thus, while China’s economic growth and its concomitant expanding global reach hint at the possibilities for the disruption of extant hierarchies of power, these individuals offered Chinese culture as a “harmonious” alternative.

I encase the word harmonious in quotation marks on purpose, for more than any other cultural trait, references to Confucian notions of harmony and harmonious society were evoked to explain how China was not a threat to the international community. As Wang Baojia claimed above, foreigners will consider China a threat to their power unless they comprehend the importance of harmony in defining Chinese culture. Harmony as a cultural trait was seen not only as prescriptive, as a metaphor for China, but also as productive, through its perceived ability to offer the world a model for peaceful development and global relations (Guo and Guo, 2008). Yet, harmony was central to these Olympics narratives not only because of the ubiquity with which it was posited as a threat-mitigating cultural principle. Indeed, how students and young professionals critically assessed the larger official discourse of harmony was equally essential to how they invoked harmony as a cultural trait in their effort to undermine global representations of China as a threatening nation of authoritarian, communist difference.

This concept of harmonious society is part of a widespread campaign introduced by President Hu Jintao in late 2004. Seemingly prompted by China’s widening income gap and the consequent potential for domestic social instability (Guo and Guo, 2008; Solé-Farràs, 2008), harmonious society has also been used to describe strategies behind China’s international relations (Alden and Hughes, 2009; Hubbert, forthcoming [2014]; Callahan, 2004), and educational and environmental policies (Brownell, 2009b; Liao, 2007), to name a few of its potential applications. Representations of harmony took center stage at the Beijing Olympics: official materials promoted harmony as the “core and soul” of the games and the torch relay sported the title “Journey of Harmony.” The character for harmony appeared several times during the opening ceremonies, most spectacularly materializing as a series of rising and falling blocks that illustrated China’s invention of moveable type. A graduate student explained to me how the central Olympic slogan itself was a direct reflection of the harmony discourse. She explained,

The slogan “One World, One Dream” comes from China’s traditional concept of great unity: “The gentleman seeks harmony but not uniformity, the lesser man seeks uniformity, not harmony.” [People everywhere] may share the same ideals, but keep the diversity of culture. It is not necessary for us to all be the same.

Harmony was a key theme at an Olympics policy conference I attended in Beijing in 2007. Sun Deshi, a young administrator in the university department that hosted the conference, and I were working on an Olympics translation project together and we spent long hours during the conference and after discussing the content of the conference and the upcoming Olympics. Harmony was one of our common topics of conversation. Sun pointed out,

Honestly, they talk about all this harmony, and the Olympics Charter talks about world peace, but really, you have to admit that [the Olympics] are all about competition. [Harmony] is really just a government slogan. What it does is to make jobs because the government comes up with these slogans and then hires all these researchers to figure out what to do with it.

Sun’s cynicism about harmony was common. As a graduate student at the same university explained to me, “Really, Hu Jintao brought it [the concept of harmony] up in a speech and it’s all over the newspapers so everyone feels they have to talk about it, to give him face.” However, as Sun and I continued our discussion about harmony within the context of the Olympics, he also offered an alternative interpretation. This second perspective reflected Wang Baojia’s outlook on harmony’s importance as a representation of China, turning mimicry’s disempowering culturalizing practice on its head.

China does have this philosophical tradition about harmony, about people being in harmony with each other and the environment. This really will be the biggest effect of the Olympics. People are going to come here and see what an incredibly hospitable people we are, how friendly and courteous. We really do value harmony. This is the most important part of Chinese culture.

Promotional slogans from government campaigns such as the harmony one often lead to cynical commentary in China (and elsewhere). Sun’s cynicism about harmony as a cultural trait, even as he proffered it as representative of Chinese culture, reflects insight into the “imagineering” (Barmé, 2008) of the Chinese state and the potential for skeptical reception. However, despite this cynicism, slogans such as “ harmonious society,” regardless of origin, become part of public culture, their language configured as a space in which “public opinion is formed, national symbols are debated, and a national image is set apart” (Brownell, 1995: 67). ¹⁶ In this sense, rather than read such linguistic “protests” as some ineluctable resistance to the government per se, we may also consider how they reflect an awareness of global perceptions of China. Confucian notions of harmony might be interpreted as reflecting classic Weberian arguments that pose Confucianism’s stress on order and hierarchy as a barrier to modernization. ¹⁷ In contrast, these students and professionals offered harmony and their response to it not only to refute negative perceptions of China, but also to locate themselves as members of a cosmopolitan cohort of educated citizens with the right to criticize their government and consequently to locate China as an equal member among modern states.

It is important for the specific content of their narratives that these commentators were college-bound high school students at key urban high schools, university students, graduate students, and postgraduate professionals. The educated elite of the Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao reforms era have been far less disenfranchised politically and economically than earlier cohorts. Their cynical comments may thus be read less necessarily as concrete political critiques and more as confirmation that they belong to a transnational cohort of modern citizens free to raise concerns about the nation-state. When Fang Meizhen criticized Zhang Yimou’s films, she was not critical of what she called his “cultural consciousness,” his willingness to address China’s “common social problems.” “If we deny this history, we betray our history.” What did make her uneasy was his spreading the “ugly side . . . all over the world.” However, even though she was not entirely comfortable with publicizing the “ugly” of China, she and her cohort were also aware that such “willingness” marks a form of global belonging. Their critical commentary permits them to demonstrate that China, often characterized outside its borders as a threatening communist nation of censorship and authoritarian oppression, in fact permits its citizens to voice some dissent without fear of retaliation. As Fang explained,

People in the West, governments in the West, seem to view China as a threat. Now they will come here [for the Olympics] and see that we are in general a very friendly people, that we are not a threat. . . . We can now speak very openly about politics [emphasis added]. ¹⁸

Harmony, once framed as a sign of China’s inability to achieve parity, rematerializes within these narratives as a source of equivalence. First, these students and young educated adults proposed that harmony (as a cultural difference), on display through the Olympics, mitigated perceptions that China’s rise correlates with the downfall of other members of the global community. Second, and in contrast, their responses to harmony (as an official discourse) emerged as evidence of China’s similarity, specifically its membership in a global community of freethinkers. Critiques of the official harmony discourse thus had the thought-provoking and ironic effect of supporting rather than censuring the state itself as they emerged in part to reflect China’s willingness to permit criticism. They also, however, offer an equally thought-provoking example of what Rey Chow has called “coercive mimeticism” through the performance of idealized, prescriptive forms of ethnicity that authenticate the familiar, a “voluntary surrender” that marks complicity “with the guilty verdict that has been declared on them socially long before they speak” (Chow, 2002: 115). ¹⁹

Conclusion

The 2008 Beijing Olympics were a monumental emblem of contemporary China’s emergence as a major player in the global order of nation-states. Although the Olympics function as a platform for both international recognition and domestic splendor, the content of the accompanying narratives—of both domestic citizens and global media—reveals much about how the platform of this diagnostic event is embedded within conflicting hierarchies of power. That the Olympics narratives of students and young Chinese professionals simultaneously invoked and revoked historically Western models of economic modernity, essentialized tropes of Chinese culture, and official discourse suggests that the Olympics as a platform for the constitution of national identity is not a seamless, taken-for-granted one. The narratives in this article reveal the tensions and ambiguities of China’s position on the global stage. On the one hand, they reflect how China’s rapid economic growth and penetration into the world capitalist market, in combination with its continued rule by the Communist Party, is perceived to threaten Western liberal democracy and undermine current global hierarchies of power. On the other hand, these narratives also suggest the potential transformation of global positionality as Cold War anti-communism increasingly confronts an ideological utilitarianism among nations seeking alternative models of development. The contested nature of the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony and its controversial director exemplified these tensions and ambiguities. For the individuals featured in this article, Zhang Yimou served as an important cultural broker, one whose earlier artistic productions were perceived to reinforce Western skepticism about China’s modernity, but whose spectacular 2008 ceremony emerged to embody not only the nation’s past glories and its current important location in global geopolitical hierarchies of power but also its future potential. Nonetheless, the spectacularity of the performance was not a seamless translation for global viewers who, while paying homage to the ceremony’s aesthetic appeal, also stressed its perceived militancy, “forgeries,” and massive scope, as if the song and dance routine represented the Chinese nation itself.

The Olympics narratives of these students and young professionals expose how certain standards for global belonging are fiercely embedded in dominant global practices and consequently how mimicry (desires for sameness) plays an aggressive role in reinforcing these standards. Yet, a close examination of the narratives and lived practices of imitation reflects the limits of mimicry to comprehend fully contemporary negotiations of global status and power. When Huang Chuntao asserted that visitors to the Olympics would find that Beijing is just like New York and that this would nullify their perceptions of a China threat, she was both reflecting the power of mimicry to incite desire for these global standards of belonging and giving unintentional voice to mimicry’s fear that Beijing does indeed resemble New York. When high school students offered difference in the form of History Channel–friendly cultural traits as an antidote to this potential menace, they were mindful of how mimicry functions to sustain hierarchies. They were also aware that such practices had been greeted in the international arena as “proof” of China’s inability to obtain parity. When Wang Baojia offered a different cultural trait as representative of China, that of harmony, he expressed an awareness of changes in global geopolitics, a tentative intimation that compulsory imitation might no longer represent an exclusive route to belonging and status. When Sun Deshi referred to harmony as both public relations nonsense and central to China’s identity, he revealed how difference and similarity might coexist as complementary expressions of national identity and value that are recognized both domestically and internationally. Yet, their mindfulness also reminds us that mimicry functions in part through the very cultural essentialism that stems from competitions over constructions of value and hierarchies of power.

Anna Tsing once noted that margins were good places from which to view the instability of social categories (Tsing, 1994: 279; see also Taussig, 1993). ²⁰ Might these Olympics narratives reveal that these margins are not static but mobile? That what is on the margins can move into the center and that what is in the center can be displaced? As places of movement, these complicated and mediated margins perform an equally revelatory function, destabilizing both the perceived naturalness of global status and the perception that global belonging necessitates the perpetuation of uniform practice and value. Might these Olympics narratives also reveal, however, how such margins, in their “harmonious” replications of the “banal preconceptions” (Chow 2002: 107) expected of them, also become complicit in the replication of a new form of “authoritarian capitalism” (Žižek, 2011) in which citizen participation in the political process is understood as a hindrance to rather than a condition of economic development and progress?