Abstract
The ‘rise of China’ has become an increasingly prominent political and theoretical discourse both inside and outside China several years into the new millennium. Since around the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, themes of such discussions soon expanded from economic and military implications of China’s fast modernization to its cultural and political shapes and consequences. One central discussion is whether China’s ‘regeneration’ or ‘rise’ in the contemporary world of global capitalism represents an alternative social imagination or simply a replica of the Western model of modernization. Fan Yang’s book, Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization, tries to deal with this question from a critical cultural studies perspective. Yang looks at the issue of China’s cultural autonomy vis-à-vis the hegemonic global capitalism through the lens of the IPR (intellectual property rights) regime, China’s nation branding efforts and the counterfeit phenomena widely deemed in mass media from both China and abroad as an embarrassing feature of Chinese culture and society.
Yang argues that the IPR regime represents a hegemonic cultural and economic model of global capitalism, and it successfully interpellates the Chinese state into a willing subject following its model by striving to achieve a ‘national brand’, as manifested in the high-profile campaign ‘From Made in China to Created in China’. At the same time, the ‘counterfeit culture, a transnational culture of circulation whose status derives from a referential relation to the brand, also induces multifarious national imaginaries that challenge the state vision for the nation’ (p. 169).
The author mobilizes the theoretical framework of cultural imperialism to illustrate the complicated relationship among the hegemonic global capitalism embodied in the IPR regime, the Chinese state that tries hard to modernize and ‘catch up’, and the ‘national popular’ or counterfeit culture that produces alternative or even resistant cultural imaginations of the nation (pp. 9–15, 172–175). The existence of cultural imperialism or post-colonial conditions in China’s self-imagination is demonstrated in the introduction and conclusion of the book through cases of media stereotyping, official claims and popular movies.
In the main body of the book, the author uses three chapters to analyse three cases from different sites and modes of cultural production in China to tackle the delicacies and complexities of the issue of global cultural imperialism upon China and China’s alternative self-imaginations. Chapter 2 talks about the shanzhai phenomenon as a public topic that broke out in the year 2008 and lasted for about 2 years. It describes how the meanings of the term go far beyond the underground economy of making and circulating ‘illegal’ or non-brand cell phones in south China into counter-cultural practices like online parody and pastiche. Also, the chapter records the Chinese state’s efforts to discipline the shanzhai economy and shape it according to the norms of big international brands, by supporting Chinese brands and casting small manufactures into the category of an illegal and immoral economy (pp. 64–90).
Chapter 3 focuses on a low budget, but hugely popular and successful movie, Crazy Stone (2006). The author here juxtaposes fifth-generation spectacle movies as the officially granted national brand and low-budget genre films as informed mostly by the underground pirate movie circulations and consumptions. This is to ‘delve into the making of an alternative national imaginary’ by ‘examining the film as an enactment of China’s counterfeit film culture’ (p. 91). The author argues that the positive recognition of the ‘fake’ status of Crazy Stone by the mass of consumers signifies the ‘disjunctive mode of being in the nation, disrupting the homogeneous temporality on which nation branding’s interpellation ultimately depends’ (p. 91).
Finally, Chapter 4 deals with a case I think most relevant to the conflict between the IPR regime, the Chinese state and the so-called Chinese counterfeit culture – the transformation of Silk Street (秀水街), a famous shopping destination for fake international brands frequented mostly by Western visitors in Beijing. The Chinese state’s efforts to turn Silk Street into a national brand selling traditional Chinese products, the international brands’ collective legal actions against the Street and the vendors’ protests and resistance to both have demonstrated an intricate picture of the cultural politics and transnational power struggles in World Trade Organization-era China.
The book contains very detailed research on these three cases, and the argument that China is under the cultural imperialist influence of global capitalism and needs to explore alternative imaginary resources in envisioning her future development is generally sound and well-grounded. However, I hope to point out a few instances where the author might be drawing an overly simplistic picture. First, the IPR regime as the hegemonic ideological power of global capitalism may be given too much credit in this book. Besides the case of the Silk Street, which directly involves the disciplining power of international brands, other cases do not exactly constitute an embracement of or resistance to the IPR regime by the Chinese state or ordinary people. The issue of shanzhai phones or popular movies imitating Hollywood genres is talked about in the Chinese context more or less in terms of creativity and originality, rather than in sharp legal terms of copyright or IPR. Although the IPR institution is established based on the modernist idea of creativity, individuality and originality, which is indeed a cultural imperialist force in contemporary Chinese understanding of cultural production, it does not mean that the Chinese state necessarily buys into the system sincerely and completely. The Chinese state is actually quite pragmatic in dealing with the international pressure from the IPR regime, using slogans of protecting copyright, on one hand, and tolerating quite a bit of underground economic activity, on the other. And on this note, how much of these shanzhai or mimicry practices in the cultural realm necessarily represent resistance to global capitalism is also dubious and unsettled, and needs further discussion, analysis and debate. Could they also be alternative, not to capitalism per se, but to the Western style of capitalism, and constitute a capitalism with Chinese characteristics?
A final point is about the dichotomy between the Chinese state that succumbs to the ideology of global capitalism and the national popular that carries on the memories and practices of socialist history. That is indeed an attractive way of mapping the ideological struggle and cultural contestation of today’s China, except that it is too simplistic. The state as a monolithic entity with unifying ideology, subjectivity and coordinated actions just does not exist in contemporary China. The intensifying divisions in Chinese society appear not only between classes, geographical locations, or between the state and society, but also within the state and the ideological spheres within the parameters of state influence. In the book, for example, the author uses CCTV or China Daily reports as evidence of the state position on certain issues, but it is very easy to find different media outlets, all seemingly state-sanctioned, fighting each other fiercely in the public arena. In studying the cultural and ideological trends in contemporary China, the state versus society dichotomy is perhaps more limiting than enabling for us to have a nuanced, historicized and reflexive understanding of the issue.