Abstract
Gladys Pak Lei Chong’s monograph covers a global mega-event, a historical moment, a fascinating project that, presumably, should have placed contemporary China more centrally in the cartography of global (soft) power – the Beijing Olympics, of 2008, a decade ago. In the concluding chapter, Chong recalls how, as early as 2009, she submitted an article on the Olympics to a journal and was told that no reviewer could be found for such a worn-out topic, and she continues to reflect on ‘the time- and topic-sensitive nature of this research project in the academic world’ (p. 185). For me, the book itself is the best evidence that what is analysed may be dated, but never the analysis. Chinese Subjectivities and the Beijing Olympics will long outlive the 17 days in the summer of 2008, for at least two reasons. First, its meticulous and incisive Foucauldian examination of the Chinese party–state nexus and the productive aspect of its exercise of power has not lost any of its relevance to what is happening in contemporary China: enhancing and legitimizing its global position and its national regime. It should serve as an excellent lens for anyone exploring the field of China studies. Second, for all its innovative and refreshing choice of cases to study – from taxi drivers to volunteers, from Beijing to Hong Kong – Chong’s book offers a handy methodological template for similar projects in the future. The manner in which Chong integrates what interests her into her project, which is sometimes unexpected, highly vernacular and eclectic, should remind researchers of an important lynchpin in qualitative work: empirical sensitivity.
Chinese Subjectivities and the Beijing Olympics begins with an introduction to the Foucauldian concepts of knowledge, power, and governmentality, with which the author builds the framework for the entire book. The book ends with a corresponding discussion of, in the author’s formulation, ‘What does Foucault do to China? What does China do to Foucault?’ (p. 186), fundamentally a plea against Chinese essentialism and exceptionalism, and at the same time a critique of Foucault’s understanding of resistance, using the Chinese experience of the Beijing Olympics. In between the opening and concluding chapters, which are dedicated to theorizations, Chong’s monograph presents us with a case study of sports figures in China. Charting the historical development from the ‘Sick Man of Asia’ to the Olympics-fed desire for ‘strong bodies’, Chapter 2 investigates changing representations of sportsmen and sportswomen, and connects gender and body to the project of nation-building and management. The second case study presented in Chapter 3 delves into the practice of volunteering, a largely overlooked area in Olympic studies. With 1.7 million volunteers, the Beijing Olympics, in Chong’s analysis, was concomitantly an occasion to drill the nation’s new ‘model citizens’. Tracing China’s history of using national shame and humiliation as a governing tool, the chapter demonstrates not only the governmental power of volunteers’ urge to restore the national ‘face’, but also their moments of resistance.
Informed by the symbolic role of taxi drivers in the public’s imagination of urbanity, Chong’s case study of this particular population is two-pronged (Chapter 4). On the one hand, it investigates how taxi drivers were disciplined to act as the ‘cultural ambassadors’ of Beijing and China. On the other, Chong went to the city and collected stories from the drivers themselves, on how they saw Beijing and the Beijing Olympics. The collection underlines a complexity of appreciation and complaint, of subservience and subversion. The subsequent chapter moves on from symbols of urbanity (taxi drivers) to the materiality of the city: architecture. Building on the key Olympic slogan ‘New Beijing, New Olympics’, Chong probes into this notion of newness as desired and constructed by the state through practices of spatial intervention. Taking the reader to Qianmen, the Olympic Green, and officially produced texts and films on Beijing, Chong examines how the city is remembered, reinvented, and projected into the future. In that sense, the state succeeded in presenting a new Beijing to the world and its dwellers, but not without the formation of new Chinese subjectivities at the same time. The final empirical study (Chapter 6) moves from China ‘proper’ to the China ‘margin’: Hong Kong. Situated in the city’s oscillation between its Chineseness and its colonial past, the chapter focuses on Olympics-related television programmes and documentaries produced jointly by a public service broadcaster and the Hong Kong government. Using supplementary observations and interviews, Chong analyses ambivalent and dynamic processes of the former colony’s ‘re-Sinification’. And the book, as mentioned earlier, returns to Foucault as an epilogue.
It is here, amidst the empirical richness and analytic depth, that I may be able to salvage some sort of comment – not so much a critique as a sigh – that the author seems to make a considerable effort to legitimize her deployment of Foucault, or in general, of ‘Western’ theories. For all the defence that Chong puts forward, I just hope that the reader will judge the use of theories, quite simply, for their usefulness, not their ‘origin’, and will basically ignore the demand for native or local theory. My second comment concerns Chong’s choice of what to study. While it is understandable for a study on state power to take official materials as its corpus, I would imagine that the inclusion of at least some discourses and texts from non-official sources might enhance the analyses and arguments contained within the book. Third, occasionally I find the book’s deployment of the word ‘resistance’ somewhat loose and overarching – for instance, when volunteers found the training programme too harsh and quit (p. 98). It may warrant a conceptual reflection on the notion of resistance and possible exploration of related concepts, for instance, refusal. My final comment is merely technical. The images reproduced in the book are often rather blurred, and do not do justice to the interesting facets that the author is striving to illustrate.
The aforementioned reservations, I hasten to add, do not tarnish the fact that Chong’s book is a highly original, informed, and eloquent examination of the Beijing Olympics, and its insights have ramifications beyond this particular event and this particular city. It is essential reading for people concerned with contemporary China, state power, and cultural politics.