Compressed modernity in South China 1

Introduction

This article examines the changing role of Hong Kong in what I propose as the formation of a compressed modernity in South China. This is a social development that is very different from popular versions of modernity in developed countries. Before 1842, when the British took over, culturally and geographically, Hong Kong was an integral part of South China. In the early colonial years, the Chinese travelled back and forth across the border without a discernible sense of cultural difference. The large cultural differentiation emerged during the post-war decades from the 1950s to the 1980s, separating mainland China under communist rule and the rapidly urbanized Hong Kong now on the other side of the Cold War divide. Fueling the desire for modernity among the people in the region, during the 1980s and on through the 1990s, the liberal Hong Kong mediascape spilled into many of the developing cities in South China. Since the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the Greater Pearl River Delta, in which Hong Kong is a small but influential city, became increasingly interconnected socially, culturally and in terms of infrastructure. The socio-cultural differentials between the two sides of the border are rapidly disappearing. Nonetheless, in terms of civic values such as free speech and law and order, the residents of Hong Kong still have a strong sense of cultural and social difference. Since the early 2000s, Hong Kong has been less a symbol of modernity for the mainland Chinese and more a resourceful node in the transborder networks of global capitalism. It is within the present environment of Hong Kong functioning as a nexus of global capitalism that I place this article.

My intent in the article is to describe the formation of what I term the ‘compressed modernity’ of this transborder region (through case studies I have conducted of this region during the past 10 years). Previously published in other contexts (see Ma, 2012), these case studies have also served to illustrate a range of features of the dramatic socio-historical formation in South China. Here in this article, I am using these cases to make an extended thesis of compressed modernity for the first time. Although I will elaborate on the concept of compressed modernity later in the article, suffice it to say it is not merely about an accelerated modernization, which many Asian countries have been experiencing (e.g. Chang, 1999). Instead, South China’s compressed modernity is about a once culturally connected region gradually separated by colonial politics, which developed into two different modes of modernity in the 1980s: Hong Kong’s brand of modernity, with its peculiar colonial history and highly commercialized urban culture, has been interacting with the developing modernity of the cities in the region. However, since 1997, Hong Kong and the rest of South China have been gradually reconnecting once again with each other. ²

Theorizing contemporary modernities

Before getting into the specifics of this social formation, I would like to provide a brief overview of some of the theoretical discussions about contemporary modernities. Cultural transfer in global capitalism has already been examined through the theoretical formulations of cultural imperialism, international communication and diffusionist modernization (Stevenson, 1992; Tomlinson, 1999). Today, numerous studies on cultural globalization, which propose a more dialectic and multifaceted cultural exchange between the ‘West’ and ‘the rest’ of the world, have replaced the early linear arguments, such as the thesis of imperialism. These studies stress the domestication (Cohen, 2002), ‘glocalization’ (Robertson, 1995) and transculturation (Chan, 2002) of dominant ‘Western’ cultural forms, such as Hollywood movies and transnational news in non-Western countries. These debates frame global-to-local cultural exchanges as a global consequence of Western modernity (Giddens, 1990). Furthermore, the thesis of multiple modernities, in which one argument is that different countries appropriated Western modernity in extremely different forms, additionally captured these exchanges (Eisenstadt, 2000).

The formation of Western modernity, as we know it, is inseparable from the histories of colonial expansion and exploitation (Darwin, 2007). While some developed cities (more fashionably known as ‘global cities’, such as New York, London and Hong Kong) prosper at the cutting edge of high modernity, the dream of modernization still immerses the developing world. Sassen (2001) popularizes the term, ‘global city’, referring to those cities that serve as important nodes in the global economy. Indeed, some cities in developing countries engage in political and economic mobilization to catch up with the West, while others, in realizing the seemingly unrealizable dream of modernity, continue to struggle over various persistent developmental problems, such as economic dependency on global financial centers and frequent political upheavals from within the nation. Still others re-invent their historical legacies to construct their own style of development in the name of national sovereignty (Bauman, 1997; Mathews et al., 2008; Touraine, 1995). For instance, when Chinese officials talk about modernization and market economy, they frequently describe a unique China with characteristics very different from other developed countries, especially when they are confronted with issues such as human rights and democratic reforms. In these disparate modern projects, numerous phenomena labeled as postmodern, when seen from a non-Western perspective, are the compressed coexistence of different modes of modernity in which the presence and absence of histories, traditions and Western imaginations mingle in novel ways (Flew, 2007; Giddens, 1990; Mathews, 2008).

Some years ago, I proposed the concept of ‘satellite modernities’ (Ma, 2001) to refer to the sites that mediate between developed centers and developing cities. In developing countries, newly modernized cities are reproducing, hybridizing and domesticating simplified imaginations of the developed West, which less developed cities and territories in the same regions also consume. In the Asian context, cities such as Tokyo and Hong Kong serve as such nodes. Satellite sites complicate the binary of the West and the non-West. As the populace migrates to these satellite cities, they consume modern lifestyles within the boundaries of their own nations or sister nations. Throughout Asia, these satellite sites draw migrants from all over the region to realize the dreams of the global West in a relatively secure and comfortable environment. As these population flows, images and capitals continue to grow at an astonishing rate, satellite sites and developed centers are networked in ever-greater complexity. These networks, whether theorized as Castells’ information society (1996), Sassen’s hierarchies of global cities (2001, 2006), or Mathews’ ‘low-end globalization’ (2011), all have highly functional nodes that facilitate exchanges and motivate modern imaginations. Hong Kong, as such a node, is the core of South China’s compressed modernity, since it has been re-embedded into the developing modernity of the region in the historical twist of 1997. It is no longer a satellite, but, in terms of infrastructure, part of the big complex network of cities in South China.

From the 1960s up to the 1980s, when Hong Kong developed into a highly modern city, transborder ties weakened and even blood ties were suppressed. The local residents of Hong Kong considered themselves modern and they belonged to the liberal camp of capitalism. They regarded their mainland relatives as the communist others. It was a bizarre historical moment that divided relatives by a Cold War ideology that resulted in a disjunctive ethno-mediascape along the mainland/Hong Kong border. In comparison with China, Hong Kong is on the political periphery, but because of its relatively free media and wide variety of media content, the Hong Kong mediascape easily penetrated the media environment of South China in the late 1970s and the 1980s. For many years, Hong Kong served as a window for China to relay to the media in Western liberal societies. Since the Open Door Policy in the late 1970s, the presence of Western culture became stronger in the lives of the Chinese people. Their frequent exposure to outside programming was via television broadcasting signals from Hong Kong. In fact, almost the entire Pearl River area (covering Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and nearly all the cities) can receive TV signals from Hong Kong. Furthermore, Hong Kong programming, including Hong Kong productions and foreign programs carried by Hong Kong channels, were all extremely popular in South China during the 1980s and 1990s. Hong Kong programs are less popular now, as the media industries in China have been rapidly commercialized.

Although Hong Kong television had a ‘colonizing’ presence in South China, before 1997, the city’s local television provided its audience with domestic Cantonese programming. At that time, the Hong Kong mediascape expressed a more intense form of modernity than that of China, and it superimposed that onto the regional ethnoscape, thus showcasing a kind of capitalistic modernity to which developing cities in the region aspired. Hong Kong is now part of South China, but is still a distinctive city in the region. Before 1997, the colony was even considered to be a city outside the national border. In the specific historical conjuncture of the 1980s, a lagging ethnoscape and a forward mediascape merged to trigger complex socio-cultural exchanges. From this perspective, Hong Kong’s forward mediascape should not be interpreted as being in a ‘progressive’ stage. I am not assuming a modernization project in which ‘backward’ societies are developing into better ones. The concept of a lagging-behind, yet forward-looking, ethnoscape is a descriptive frame that reflects the political and popular desire of post-socialist China to leap forward into global modernity.

For those living in South China and consuming Hong Kong media content in the 1980s and the 1990s, their transborder imagination constituted a combination of the immediate experiences in the their own ethnoscape and the spillover content from Hong Kong media. For instance, they would be watching middle-class lifestyle dramas with TV actors drinking in stylish bars in downtown Hong Kong, but, in fact, there was no bar culture in many parts of South China at that time. This text/context dialectic reflects a complex cultural hybridization, simultaneously refracted and structurated by this disjunctive ethno-mediascape. The Hong Kong mediascape, superimposed onto the South China ethnoscape, fuelled the imagination of Hong Kong’s satellite modernity and extended the interlocking discursive networks connecting South China with Hong Kong and global capitalism. The term, ‘satellite’, refers to the nexus that relays sites of high modernity and developing modernities. Local consumption of this imagination is thus a creative hybridization and contextualization of the mediascape and the ethnoscape by an active audience, resulting in the push and pull of both the imaginary and the practical. For instance, many Hong Kong pop singers and movies stars are well known to audiences in the region. These pop icons carry or embody the imaginations of Hong Kong modern culture, and fans put these lifestyles into practices in localized ways. ‘Hong Kong Style’ tea houses, beauty shops, boutiques, etc., were, and still are, very popular in South China.

Reintegrating Hong Kong

Since 1997, Hong Kong has gone through another twist and been reintegrated once more into South China. Highways, bridges, and express rails have been rapidly connecting Hong Kong and nearby cities. Officials and entrepreneurs meet and collaborate, while ordinary people travel back and forth for business and pleasure. Although business and social networks have been built, subtle distinctions still exist between Hong Kong and the remainder of the South China region. Reintegration involves complex processes of uneven economic, social and cultural reconfigurations. The influx of migrant laborers from rural areas, the mixing and blending of different lifestyles, the flow of global capital, and the ushering in of new ideas and practices from Hong Kong and the world have transformed South China into what geographer Soja (2000) describes as a ‘post-metropolis’.

In the 1990s, the term post-metropolis was applied to the networked cities of Los Angeles. It is a conceptual lens through which to view the reconstruction of an old industrial city center and its reconnection to neighboring cities. Satellite towns connect via transportation and information infrastructures to form mega cities of a colossal scale. Unlike the metropolis where the level of urbanization gradually decreases with the radius further away from the center, a post-metropolis has multiple centers scattering out to the different nexuses of the network. The term post-metropolis can describe the compressed modernity in South China. It is a dense network of cities with Hong Kong’s brand of modernity renationalized ³ and pressed against the developing cities in South China.

It is within this socio-historical formation of the past three decades and the theoretical framing of compressed modernity, that the following case studies are situated. From the dozens of case studies in my recent book on cultural politics (Ma, 2012), I have selected four cases to illustrate some prominent features of the formation of the compressed modernity in South China. The first case is a lifestyle magazine produced in the 1980s, dramatizing the imagination of Hong Kong’s brand of modernity for mainland Chinese readers. The second case is a TV drama produced in the 1990s, also for mainland viewers. I would like to show, in this case, how desires and apprehensions about Hong Kong are represented in a popular drama. The third and fourth cases are a toy factory and a disco bar in South China, which depict the lifestyles of Hong Kong and South China mixing and matching in dramatic ways.

Case 1: A lifestyle magazine

The first case involves a Guangzhou-based magazine entitled Xianggang Feng Qing (Hong Kong Features). Founded in 1985, Xianggang Feng Qing was regarded as groundbreaking because it specifically provided light-hearted coverage of Hong Kong’s lifestyles and culture. Practically the only publication of this sort in the mainland media industry in the mid-1980s, for many years, it served as a window on Hong Kong for mainland readers. However, since 1997, Hong Kong has no longer been the major focus of the magazine and, in 2001, the magazine revamped into a trendy consumerist publication. Thus, as an illustrative case, it demonstrates the changing cultural interactions between Hong Kong and China in the last two decades.

When it was first launched in 1985, Xianggang Feng Qing took the market by storm – it was an instant hit among readers. Although priced at 0.65 yuan (RMB) per copy, it was soon fetching a black market price of 1.2–1.5 yuan in other Chinese provinces. Sales figures rose rapidly and the initial 100,000 copy print-run was increased to a circulation of several hundred thousand copies per issue. Xianggang Feng Qing also caught the attention of Hong Kong journalists. Because it provided comprehensive non-judgmental information about Hong Kong, it was described as an ‘unprecedented’ publication on the mainland (Ming Pao, 12 July 1985, p.37). I did a brief content analysis of the early issues of the magazine (from 1985 to 1995) and found that it covered mostly (in descending order): social information, leisure activities, economic information, and a very small amount of political news. Since there were conspicuous differences between Hong Kong and China and the information flow across the border was somewhat restricted, the magazine became a particularly popular publication because it satisfied readers’ need for information about – and a desire for – the Hong Kong way of life. The magazine borrowed and reproduced significant media content from Hong Kong. Many readers wrote to the editor, saying that the magazine was unique and stood out from other popular magazines in the market. In fact, this can be regarded as a domestication of the Hong Kong mediascape; Hong Kong imageries, representations, stories, show business gossip and public affairs were all repackaged for the consumption of the mainland readers. For instance, the successful stories of Hong Kong tycoons were frequently featured, telling mainland readers the tricks for earning their first bucket of gold.

In the first decade (the 1980s) of the ‘Open Door Policy’, Hong Kong served as a key information provider for China and helped to bridge the tremendous information gap between China and the rest of the world. The most palpable factors fueling the imagination of Hong Kong as a signpost of modern living include the continued proliferation of Hong Kong media products in China, along with the desire among China’s rising middle class to catch up with modern living, the prominent discourse of Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997, and the increasingly clear articulation of a strong local cultural identity in Hong Kong. We can discern a strong desire for change from a private letter sent from a Communist Party member to the editor-in-chief of Xianggang Feng Qing in 1987. The editorial office was based in Guangzhou. The letter read:

Hong Kong represents free competition, equal opportunity, rule of law, freedom of speech, religious freedom, the power of knowledge, the survival of the fittest … We should propagate these positive aspects of Hong Kong, and criticize the evils of mainland society, such as the suppression of alternative opinions, obsession with power, the neglect of knowledge; all these are feudalism; they are no good for the developing market economy and they are oppressing the people … [my translation]

Hong Kong, as represented in the magazine, symbolized an advanced and modern society. In fact, the cover of the debut issue in 1985 showed a panoramic view of Victoria Harbor, with high-rise buildings filling up the skyline. The editor told me in a personal interview: ‘Hong Kong tells you what is modern!’ However, as vividly illustrated by the drastic changes experienced by Xianggang Feng Qing, the 2000s saw a tremendous decrease in Hong Kong’s role as both an information provider and an icon of the modern imagination. After 1997, as information about Hong Kong became more generally accessible, the number of readers of the magazine dropped sharply. In 2001, in Hong Kong, Xianggang Feng Qing was completely revamped and repositioned as a trendy magazine to compete with its international counterparts, such as Elle and Cosmopolitan. Its Hong Kong content was reduced, while its transnational and middle-class leisure and lifestyle coverage became more prominent. A new English title, Seen, was adopted and the Hong Kong celebrities on the cover were replaced by regional and international models and pop stars. The most revealing change involved the redesign of the Chinese title, Xianggang Feng Qing. The size of the two characters, Xianggang (Hong Kong), was reduced drastically, essentially promoting the two remaining characters, Feng Qing (Features), as the new title of the magazine. Hong Kong was no longer a ‘mysterious’ place that intrigued the mainland readers. Here, Xianggang Feng Qing is used to feature the formation of South China’s compressed modernity as a historical process. Hong Kong, mediated by the magazine, served as a satellite modern city in the 1980s for mainland readers to imagine and relay ‘Western’ modernity in a culturally familiar manner.

Case 2: A TV drama

The second case, a TV drama produced by mainland producers, illustrates the interface of Hong Kong’s colonial modernity and the developing modernity in the region, in the historical conjuncture of the 1990s, when Hong Kong was about to be returned to China. The selected TV drama is indicative of the discursive moment in which mainland Chinese were eager to learn from, and participate in, the market economy as represented by Hong Kong. This drama series, entitled Black Ice (or Cocaine), is a 20-episode crime story, which first aired in the late 1990s. It was selected as a sample for this study because of its aesthetic merits as well as its popularity and theoretical relevance. Well received nationally, especially in South China, where the story is based, its plot features major Hong Kong characters. The story is about a mainland entrepreneur-cum-drug dealer and his fatal attraction to an undercover Hong Kong woman investigator. The production team and the entire cast are all from mainland China. The story represents the imagination of Hong Kong from a mainland perspective at the particular moment at which Hong Kong was about to return to the Chinese nation. The drama provides a window through which to see how the imagination of a modern city, as embodied in the major Hong Kong character, projects from the social location of developing cities in China, where a modern way of life, especially in terms of business skills, is eagerly sought. In the drama series, there is highly visible discourse on the superiority of scientific and managerial knowledge. For example, it depicts the scientific processes of assembly line production in significant technical detail. The characters engage in lengthy discussions of physics, chemistry and engineering. The Hong Kong audience would have found such scenes boring and unnecessary. However, factual details and the didacticism of scenes that demonstrate how things work in modern factories are conspicuously natural in Black Ice. It is natural to the mainland audience because modern knowledge is entertaining when it fulfills a psychological need to catch up with the rest of the world. The drama provides detailed popular knowledge about the city of Hong Kong. This includes how the people who live there do business, invest, manage large companies and enjoy a leisurely consumerist life. It also offers popular knowledge of how to behave like a professional in a modern capitalist world.

These glimpses of lifestyle and habits are associated with the Hong Kong character, Miss Wang, depicted as a sophisticated businesswoman enlightening her mainland counterparts in the big company about the small town. An interesting twist in Black Ice is that modern capitalism is domesticated by ‘Chinese philosophy’, when the mainland entrepreneur, Dr Kwok, the male protagonist, delivers long speeches that blend Western business expertise with quotations from Chinese classics, novels and famous authors. These ‘preachy’ discourses were not considered inappropriate among the Chinese audience at that point of time in the 1990s, since they served the multiple functions of entertaining, informing and educating the audience on how to domesticate the logics of a market economy that was new to them.

Each episode of Black Ice opens with a lengthy, scrolling preamble. In official language, it tells the audience that ‘ice’ (the local term for methamphetamine) is the drug of the corrupting Western world and how important it is for China to wage war against drug trafficking and corruption. However, the mainland protagonist, Dr Kwok, is both a successful businessman and a drug dealer who has committed murder. Although Wang, the Hong Kong businesswoman, embodies the ideal of a modernized world, she is also an undercover agent spying on Dr Kwok. Her double identity eventually proves lethal to Kwok. Fully aware of the potential danger, he is nevertheless strongly attracted to Wang’s elegance and temperament as well as her skilful social and business maneuvering. He finds the charm of this Hong Kong woman irresistible and, indeed, he half-knowingly steps into the trap she has arranged for him. Exhibiting a deep conflict between the strong aspirations for entrepreneurial success and the corrupt power of capitalistic modernity, these double identities of Wang and Kwok are the crux of the drama’s attractions and tensions. As the object of both fantasy and rivalry for Chinese mainlanders, the love/fear complex attached to the Hong Kong character is also a reflection of the double identity of modern Hong Kong.

Produced entirely by mainlanders, the drama represents the imagination of Hong Kong from a specific historical period of the 1990s, when China’s emerging market economy and oscillating state control were the ultimate concerns. For many years, mainland politics have policed televisual discourses heavily – scripts are censored before they can be produced. In Black Ice, the most explicit textual front stage is the politically correct anti-drug and pro-Hong Kong discourse. Each episode begins with the aforementioned documentary-style screed, which publicizes the harmful effects of drug use and the government’s determination to battle drug trafficking. The Hong Kong character, Wang, is a police officer on the righteous side of law enforcement. The narrative celebrates the fruitful collaboration between Hong Kong and China. In the end, despite his charm and success, the drug dealer is killed. However, beneath these politically correct textual surfaces and esoteric modes of textual compression, an unspeakable, heretical discourse is constructed. The Hong Kong businesswoman is dangerous; the drug dealer’s management skills are much-needed knowledge for China’s market economy, while the power and money of big businesses are the enviable price of modernity.

In the first case study presented above, I focused more on the early stage of the formation of a compressed modernity in the 1980s, when the socio-cultural differentials between Hong Kong and South China were high. It was the moment in which Hong Kong’s satellite modernity was dramatized by a mainland magazine to fuel the desire among the mainland readers for a better and more modern life. In the second case study, the TV drama represents another moment in the 1990s when Hong Kong was about to be reconnected as part of South China. My goal was to use this case to illustrate how, in the particular historical juncture of the 1990s, Hong Kong, as a modern city on the doorstep of mainland China, served as a metaphor, an anchor or a point of reference for the mainland audience to embody the fantasy, knowledge and anxiety of modernization. Imaginations of modernity were less dramatic and inflated when compared with the first case study, nevertheless, the modern imaginations, as meditated by the TV drama in the present case, were full of the contradictory sentiments of fear and excitement. These sentiments become understandable when we place them in the historical conjuncture of the 1990s, when the compressed modernity of South China that I am proposing was about to combine the ethnoscapes of both sides of the Hong Kong/South China border.

Case 3: A toy factory

The previous two cases (a magazine and a TV drama) touch on significant features of South China’s compressed modernity in the formative stages of the 1980s and the 1990s, respectively. Moving into the 2000s, by which time Hong Kong had been reconnected to China, the impact of Hong Kong’s colonial modernity upon the developing modernity in the Southern cities has become more intense. While this case is an ethnographic study of a toy factory in the 2000s, which I did some years ago, the previous case study offered a televisual representation of a factory in the 1990s. Here, I want to use the study of a toy factory to highlight the recent socio-cultural formation in the region.

For more than three decades, South China has been a world factory, manufacturing consumer goods for the rest of the world. Major international brands have established their production lines there. In the summer of 2001, I (with three research assistants) stayed in a factory in South China. It was owned by my high school classmate Mr Leung. A team of Hong Kong managers supervises this medium-sized factory, which produces American toys. One of my research assistants served as a factory worker for three months, while I worked more closely with the managers of the factory and interviewed migrant workers befriended by my research assistants. We also branched out to other social networks for interviews and participant observations.

Into the 2010s, with its huge consumer demands driving the otherwise fatigued world market, China was already a dominant player in global capitalism. However, in the early 2000s, when I visited the toy factory, China was on the threshold of catching up with the world. The timing provided a window of opportunity to understand how this Hong Kong managed factory used modern management technologies to exploit and transform the lives of migrant workers aspiring for a better standard of living. In the first two cases cited above, I stress the mediated aspects of South China’s compressed modernity in its early stages of formation; in this case study, I will focus more on its expressions in the lifeworlds of the toy factory.

Although Hong Kong had a manufacturing industry just a few decades ago, this is no longer the case. Factories have relocated. Rent and salary levels are so high in the territory that highly calculated instrumental rationality permeates the city spaces. Rental contracts in the property market are signed for a short period of one to two years. In the busy streets of Hong Kong, shops are continuously transforming. Since the 1980s, investment financial services and a highly fluid property market have propelled Hong Kong’s economy. Using Bauman’s (2000) terminology, Hong Kong has already moved away from solid modernity (the Fordist mode of assembly line economy) and is now deeply embedded in liquid modernity (the post-Fordist mode of knowledge-based economy). Since the 1980s, Hong Kong manufacturers have begun exploiting the manufacturing opportunities in South China, such as lower rent and cheaper labor, and have set up factories there to produce toys, garments and furniture for both the national and international markets.

The factories in South China attract massive migration from the rural areas to the urban areas, from the north to the south, and from the inner cities to the coastal lands. This migration has reflected one of the significant social changes in China since the 1990s (Lin, 1997; Logan, 2002; Wang and Cai, 2009). As China catches up with modernity, and as overseas capital, ideas, information, technology and people all rush into China for larger markets and lower costs, many of the Chinese are also pursuing their own versions of modern life. Rural laborers are attracted to the factories for various reasons. Escaping economic hardship was the reason most frequently mentioned by the workers. For example, a packing supervisor we interviewed joined her cousins and started working in the factory because a drought in her hometown, in 1993, had ruined the crops her family had planted. The gigantic economic gap between South China and her home village became the pulling force, while excessive labor in rural China was the great pushing force. Most of the workers we met in the factory had only completed junior high school and they did not have highly specialized work skills. Most of them told us in interviews and casual conversations that it was difficult to find a job at home in the rural areas. While production lines in South China require only minimal education and skills, they simultaneously require intensive labor. Hence, rural migrant workers are most welcome in these factory clusters.

I have exhaustively discussed this ethnographic study elsewhere (Ma, 2006). Therefore, I would now like to concentrate exclusively on a discussion of the lifeworlds in the factory, where disciplining ‘modern bodies’ is actualized by applying, sometimes high-handedly, into the locality, various technologies from afar. There were imposing regulations to re-skill the workers at the assembly line. Reflexivity, time-space distancing and disembedding, the three dynamics of modernity that Giddens (1990) pinpointed decades ago, can be applied perfectly to the micro level in this factory. Indeed, the workers were disembedded bodies. Moving away from their home villages, they found themselves working and consuming in a city where habits were in flux and prevailing norms did not connect people with past traditions, but cast individuals into the hope of being fully integrated into the city one day. Whether found in traditional society or in modernity, reflexivity is one of the core capacities of the human mind and body. However, only the modern bodies in our case study were radically reflexive since they were constantly monitoring what was happening around them and they subsequently fine-tuned themselves to better survive the opportunities coming their way. It was not only that the workers were learning by monitoring each other; they were also influenced by a reflexive set of both on-site and faraway connections.

Look at the photo in Figure 1: a line supervisor is holding a toy while overseeing the workers. It is a vivid image of the bodily discipline of a production regime. Nonetheless, if you look carefully at the shadows and the faces of workers, you might be able to speculate on the on-site and remote technologies at work. On site, you see the machine, the supervision, the focused mind and the restricted motion of the working bodies. However, there are strings pulling from faraway places. The demand side of the picture was the highly sought after toys of everything relating to the New York 9/11 rescue. At the time of the research, orders from the United States were coming in rapidly, and workers were having to work overtime to meet the demands of the Christmas gift season. In addition to this demand side of the story, there were a few sets of technologies further ‘working’ on the working bodies. A large Hong Kong family (six brothers and sisters) ran this factory. Most of them were educated in the United States and were well equipped with experience and textbook knowledge of marketing and modern management. The second brother had obtained a PhD in sociology and the others had solid training and experience in engineering and management. Other family members and relatives tightly controlled and filled the managerial grades. Therefore, it is fair to say that in this particular case, by applying management technologies they had acquired from schools in Hong Kong and overseas, a closed circle of Hong Kong managers had disciplined the rural migrant workers coming from all over China.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Supervisor oversees workers in a toy factory (photo by Ducky Tse)

In the first two case studies, we see the dynamics of the disjunctive ethno-mediascape in the Hong Kong/South China hybrid of the 1980s and 1990s. On the two sides of the border between Hong Kong and South China, there were two very different ethnoscapes – highly modern and market-driven, and aspiring for a market economy under the rule of an authoritarian state, respectively. The two selected case studies, a magazine and a TV drama, offer a glimpse of how Hong Kong’s brand of modernity was mediated for the mainland people in the 1980s and the 1990s. Here, in this third case, modern imaginations are not just mediated, but realized in the lifeworlds of a factory. We see how the rural workers learn to be ‘modern’ by working through the rules and regulations set by a Hong Kong style management and the market demands from overseas. In the 2000s, as Hong Kong has been returned to China and can no longer be seen as a British colony, the different ethnoscapes on both sides of the border have been interconnected in a rather compressed and hybridized way. However, South China, with Hong Kong as a part of it, is yet to be a homogeneous region.

Case 4: A disco bar

In 2003, I conducted another ethnographic study, this time with two research assistants (Ma, 2006) in a disco bar in Shenzhen. The bar, by the name of TC-1, targets middle-class clients. Some of the waiters, who were earlier migrant workers in the factories, now work in such bars and entertainment sites in South China. Service industries are booming, and many of them absorb a considerable number of unskilled migrant workers. That is certainly the case at the TC Clubs in Shenzhen. TC is a chain corporation with five upscale bars and theme restaurants in Shenzhen. I visited various TC bars and restaurants regularly for a year, and my research assistant worked as a waiter in the largest disco, TC-1, for a month. TC-1 has three components: a disco, a bar and a Western restaurant (steakhouse). The lighting in the disco is dim. The disc jockey plays hip-hop music and female dancers wearing revealing clothes move their bodies wildly on stage. Male customers look at them with desire in their eyes. Female customers watch the dancers and try to learn their steps. They all follow the beat of the music and move their bodies to the rhythm. In the bar, most customers arrive in groups of friends. Many of them order beer. Some mix red wine with soft drinks, while others enjoy fancy cocktails. Every night, customers pack the 300-seat disco bar. How do migrant workers from rural China, who had earlier worked in toy factories, but were now working in these clubs, make sense of this sensuous world of consumption? How does this glamorous nightlife transform the lifestyles of these workers? We attempted to answer these questions in our research.

Instead of making toys, the TC workers were providing a modern service that involved both emotional and manual labor. In order to convey a carefree feeling to the customers, the workers, to a certain extent, had to convince themselves that life in the disco bar was trendy and cool. They cheered and sang when the performers on the stage finished their songs. In Hochschild’s (2003) words, the waiters had to do the emotional work of ‘deep acting’ to convincingly sell individualism and carnival consumerism to the customers. Those who worked in the disco section paid particular attention to the way they dressed and looked. In fact, they were usually handpicked during the recruitment exercises. Only people who were young and good-looking were selected for these positions.

Bosses, managers and the urban nouveau riche are powerful models for de- territorialized workers. The customers spend money to have fun at the TC bars and clubs, while the staff members work for miniscule wages. Although such a disparity in wealth may trigger a sense of jealousy and inferiority, it also provided the workers with motivation for upward mobility. Indeed, a security guard at TC admitted, ‘Sometimes, the thought of robbing customers comes to my mind. The money they spend in one night is much more than what I earn in a month’. Of course, for the most part, these negative emotions are suppressed. The more acceptable and deliberately cultivated desire is to aspire to the consumerist city lifestyle. When a waiter takes an order from a beautiful woman in the noisy disco bar, he has to speak into her ear. He can ‘smell’ the difference between a worker and a well-groomed woman. Such close and sensual encounters spark the desire to live a good life.

By observing their clientele, the migrant workers witness a highly visible track of social mobility. That social track is reserved for China’s nouveau riche, who have more social capital (connections), economic capital (money and property) and cultural capital (credentials, taste and knowledge) to begin with. The structural opening of China’s market economy indeed provided new opportunities for these middle-class professionals to create their own life projects. To a certain extent, their relatively luxurious lives are built on the cheap and seemingly unlimited supply of rural migrant labor. Nevertheless, the bridges between the two tracks of social mobility are extraordinarily restrictive. The rising middle class enjoys greater freedom to express their individuality. ‘Work hard, play hard’ is the motto of the ascendant work-and-spend culture of South China. It is a newfound freedom for the new middle class and a fantasy for the migrant workers. Young urban professionals are actualizing their dream of modernity, while the common workers are relishing the success stories of the middle class. This depicts the compressed and layered tracks of development, a seemingly realizable dream for one, but a near illusion for another. Moving along these layered tracks are the rural-turned-modern bodies of migrant workers, who acquire multiple and hybridized layers of urbanity and rurality in China’s compressed modernity.

The four selected case studies are not meant to be comprehensive; they are used in this article to illustrate the different aspects of South China’s compressed modernity in different stages of its formation. The first two cases concern mediation – both belong to the stage of early formation. The third and fourth cases are on micro social processes in the 2000s. The stories of the migrant workers in the toy factory and the disco bar are snapshots of this compressed modernity. Most migrant workers have gone through the living space of rural villages, Fordist production lines in the factory and other modern consumerist spaces in the cities. While a few of them remained in the city, most of them went back to their rural homeland. Generally, they experienced the factory life of modernity. Although disembedded from rural traditions, they also saw traditional kinship and ethnic ties in the factory as a safety net in times of need. The compressed modernity in South China can also be seen in the ambiguous coexistence of modern desire and postmodern displays. In developed countries, the aesthetic pursuit of differences, of irregularities, of surface meanings and of rupture comes from the desire to deconstruct the modern notion of linearity, of grand narrative, of deep structure and of binary opposition. Yet, in South China, we can see both the complexity and the fluidity brought about by the display of the modern desire for grandness, growth and capital expansion. Urban spaces feature a unique coexistence of different aesthetics, as do the micro ethno-methods people have acquired, with ‘Hong Kong style’ being a significant reference.

Hong Kong and its impact in South China

The above cases are merely glimpses of the contemporary socio-historical formation in South China. They touch on several aspects related to media and urban culture in the region. In this final section, I would like to elaborate on the thesis of the compressed modernity of South China, using the above as illustrative cases. Hong Kong’s brand of modernity is inseparable with its colonial history. Countries from all over the world have their own engagement with modernity in extremely different configurations. South China’s modernity can be characterized as compressed and hybridized in the sense that different modes of modern configurations are pressed onto each other.

Hong Kong’s colonial history has been a significant component in this socio-historical process. The colony bore the name, ‘Pearl of the Orient’, since its early days of realizing a peculiar brand of colonial modernity, which I refer to as the partial borrowing and imitating of some aspects of the British social infrastructure, such as the rule of law, free speech and the logistics of running a modern city. Nevertheless, the colonial side of Hong Kong’s modernization was that Hong Kong’s people were not allowed to develop their own subjectivity. When it came to politics, their voices were always pretty much suppressed.

In the decades after World War II, particularly since the mid-1960s, Hong Kong society has gradually developed a strong local identity (Mathews et al., 2008; Luk, 1995; Sinn, 1995). In order to maintain political stability and economic prosperity, which had long been serving the interests of Britain and Hong Kong, as well as those of China, both the colonial and the Chinese governments refrained from mobilizing strong nationalistic (and anti-nationalistic) sentiments in the territory of Hong Kong. The local Hong Kong culture reflected more of a sense of identification and belongingness than of political citizenship. Significant differences in the standard of living when compared with that of mainland China sustained the imagined community of Hong Kong. Most of Hong Kong’s people are ethnic Chinese, but from the 1960s to the 1990s, many locals considered themselves different breeds because Hong Kong had a strong market economy and exhibited a consumerist lifestyle quite different from that of the rest of China. However, because of the implementation of elaborate sets of administrative procedures, the quests for autonomy were conspicuously absent in the colonial days. Ambrose King (1974), an influential Hong Kong scholar, once described this as the administrative absorption of politics, while Law (1997) called it a kind of managerialism, focusing on how to do things effectively, but without thinking about visions for the city. The strong sense of pride of the local people was, and still is, more or less rooted in this colonial modernity, which excels in doing business, brokering interests, focusing on efficiency and developing a world-class market economy. Instrumental rationality – a significant stamp of modernity (Giddens, 1990) – has been a celebrated strength of the ex-colony. It is the ability to make elaborate rational calculations to manage public affairs and commercial activities in effective ways. In short, Hong Kong’s colonial modernity has been strong in running an aggressive market economy, but weak at steering the wheel of development through an autonomous polity.

Hong Kong colonial modernity, with its free energetic media, served as a model for the developing cities in South China. Imagined or real, through the 1980s until the early 1990s, the Hong Kong mediascape spilled into the ethnoscapes in South China, fueling the desire for and offering the knowledge of appropriating a seemingly Western modernity. South China’s modern formation is compressed and hybridized, not only because it has had a very rapid transformation in temporal terms, but also because there has been a long history of Hong Kong’s colonial modernity influencing the rest of South China.

Thus, Hong Kong, now an integral part of South China, has played an important role in the formation of this compressed modernity. As a highly modernized city, Hong Kong both embodies and displays the ideas and practices of a modern urban culture. Postcards, magazine covers and the electronic and silver screens in the disjunctive ethno-mediascape of the region have all featured the urban imagination of Hong Kong and its mediated representations of urbanity. These representations include the commercial and residential high rises in downtown Central, the panoramic night view of the Victoria Harbor, the glamour of its vibrant show business and the success stories of the rich and famous. These mediated images and stories circulate all over South China, stimulating the cultural imaginations of and the desire for modernity. Capital, entrepreneurs and media representations directly and indirectly exemplify what modernity and urbanity could mean across the border.

The cases introduced above only partially illustrate these complex dynamics. In the first case study, during the 1980s, we saw how a magazine had become the site of imagining modernity via its representations of Hong Kong society. In the second case study, a television drama vividly expressed the longing of the Chinese for the technical expertise of ‘being modern’, and the anxiety when a Hong Kong woman, symbolizing capitalistic modernity, was brought into the heart of China’s marketization. In the third case study, a toy factory, a symbol in itself of mass mechanical production in the early days of modernity, is managed by Hong Kong managers, equipped with the latest skills of marketing, logistics and international trade. The fourth case study has less to do with the Hong Kong connection, and more to do with the juxtaposition, and thus compression, of the lifeworlds of the working class and the consumerist lifestyle of the rising middle class in the confined space of a disco bar. Undoubtedly, there are numerous other relevant cases, but the four cases discussed in this chapter suffice to highlight a few defining characteristics of South China’s compressed modernity.

In the past two decades, many scholars have broadly proposed the theoretical differentiation of modernity into two phases. Beck and Beck-Gernscheim (2002) call the first phase simply modernity and the second, ‘reflexive’ modernity. Bauman (2000) calls it solid and liquid modernity; he uses the terms, heavy and light capitalism, to differentiate between the two. Heavy capitalism is exemplified by the Fordist mode of production, linking up land, capital, machines and labor. Light capitalism, as exemplified by the post-Fordist and knowledge-based economies, which are reflexive and mobile, has been delinking land, capital and labor using information technologies.

The formation of modernity in South China is a compression of the first and second phase; its factory economy is rapidly catching up with existing modes of the second modernity. Benefiting from the acceleration effects of time-space compression and the distancing of information technologies, China is now providing and sustaining transnational liquid modernity with its cheap and extremely competitive labor base. This can be best demonstrated by the production and consumption of IT products, such as smart phones and tablet computers, which are now produced primarily in South China, and consumed by relatively affluent consumers all over the world, including the new rich in China. The liquid modernity we are experiencing in recent years is pretty much IT based. It cuts across national borders where the ‘information have-mores’ (Qiu, 2009) are enjoying the fluidity in their work life and leisure brought about by a wide variety of IT products. However, China (and some other parts of Asia) has become the production base of this transnational IT ecology. China (and some Asian countries) has developed this compressed mode of modernity in one way or the other, in which light and heavy capitalism and solid and liquid modes of modernity are hybridizing in a way that is rare in North America and in the European countries.

Contemporary Hong Kong, positioned more toward the fluid second modernity, has been exploiting the assembly line economy of South China and has thus become an integral part of the compressed modernity of the Pearl River Delta region. At the same time, Chinese elites in the region, such as the clients in the disco bar in the fourth case study presented here, enjoy the flexibility and reflexivity of transnational liquid modernity as expressed in various forms of city life in Hong Kong. South China’s version of modernity combines the Fordist mode of production-led heavy capitalism and the post-Fordist mode of untamed, light-weight and consumption-led capitalism. In South China, the urbanization process was compressed into less than 30 years. South China used to be an agricultural and fishing region with large historical cities such as Guangzhou serving as trading centers. Since the Open Door Policy of the 1980s, China has been actively reconnecting itself to the global economy. The influx of foreign capital and entrepreneurs has kicked off rapid economic growth, and disorganized urbanization and rural-to-urban migration. In South China, instead of just a high concentration of capital investment, there has also been a rapid industrialization of the countryside since most foreign capital was anchored in medium-sized Fordist factories (Lin, 1997).

Most large networks of cities in developed countries have gone through gradual long-term stages of industrialization, urbanization, metropolitanization and suburbanization. In contrast, South China combines pre-modern (traditional), agricultural, industrial and modern practices in a mixed bag. In another article (Ma and Cheng, 2007), I (with my research assistant, Helen Cheng) interviewed a dozen female migrant workers in South China and talked extensively about their wedding practices. The female workers were caught between the traditional norms of early marriage and the liberal views of independence, autonomy and professional development. In other words, rural–urban integration is so compressed that I suggest there has been a different form of modernity actualizing in South China, with Hong Kong being a significant motivating force. This ‘compressed modernity’ has multiple socio-cultural layers juxtaposed against each other. In spatial terms, factory zones are layered upon agricultural communities. In cultural terms, traditional practices mix with consumerist lifestyles. In social terms, the working class comes into close contact with the increasingly affluent middle class, producing circumstances of shocking social inequality. These local tracks of social mobility are multilayered and revolve around the push-and-pull of global transnational dynamics.

When the histories of modernity are imagined and transplanted, they are oftentimes hybridized and compressed. The case of South China may find an echo in the rapid modernization in many Asian countries (Chang, 1999), especially on the hybridizing of solid and liquid modes of modernity, which is very unique to South China and to other Asian nations. However, it is problematic, or extremely difficult, to generalize on a convincing Asian modernity simply because the socio-historical conditions of different parts of Asia are so diverse. Developing nations often subscribe to the generalized conception of modernity, Western style, with middle-class urbanites practicing the imagined and generalized ‘Western’ ways of life, risking the suppression of their local subjectivity. This happens both in academic writing as well as in everyday practices. Thus, I think it may be productive for narrators from non-Western modernities to place their own historical specificities at the core of the theorization. My strategy in this article is to pay attention to the formation of South China’s compressed modernity at its concrete historical specificities, in which a local Hong Kong scholar like me is narrating Hong Kong from the socio-historical location of the 2010s. Further generalizations of the common pattern of modernity in Asia could be done, with thick descriptions of various formations in different parts of Asia at hand.

I would like to end this article with another contextual twist. Compounding the analysis of South China’s compressed modernity is the recent downturns of the Hong Kong economy and the rise of the new Chinese rich. The arcs of modernity have been undergoing a dramatic turn. Hong Kong’s satellite colonial modernity of the 1990s had a push-and-pull effect on the developing cities in the region. The irony is that, into the 2010s, when compared with Hong Kong, China’s economic power has been more influential on a global scale. The trajectories of modernity are at a crossroads. The newly rich from China are lining up in front of the luxury shops in Hong Kong. The Chinese from the mainland eagerly seek the most expensive homes in downtown Hong Kong. An interesting characteristic of the compressed modernity of South China is that its brothers and sisters, in some of the rich cities in China, are now surpassing Hong Kong’s colonial modernity, thus serving as a satellite city relaying Western style modernity. Nonetheless, Hong Kong’s satellite colonial modernity, with its near obsession with instrumental rationality, the rule of law, freedom of the press and the rights of individuals, still bears a sharp contrast with the developing compressed modernity of other South China cities. This subsequently adds to the complexity and compressed nature of the brand of modernity in the post-metropolis of the Pearl River Delta, as Hong Kong has inevitably been integrated into the region. I would like to conclude this essay with a poem I wrote a few years ago:

The Pearl of the Orient

Sun sets into the sea of black

Eyes covered in dreams

Pebbles on the sand shore of words

How to write about waves and wind?

Instead, pebbles being written upon

Stubborn they are – memories, of the golden years

Hong Kong, the modern city

A shining skin of thin water

The sea rising above our wide opened eyes

With 1997 sinking deep into history

As remote as a forgotten email

Eyes closing, mailbox of the night

Dreaming of a quick virus fix

The tinkling of an empty beer can

A tipsy star, light-year in a flash

Here it is the tarnished pearl of the orient

The drowsy eyes of those running Hong Kong

the ex-colony, stubborn pebbles on the sand shore

Legend-speak, decades of wind and waves

Are giving birth to another string of shining pearls