Desiring a Coherent China (2008)

In her new collection of essays anthropologist Lisa Rofel productively reexamines changes in China over the past twenty years that have too often been glossed over in the abstract terms of reform, transition, and globalization. Such accounts depict a China rapidly on its way to achieving the standard features of cultural life under global capitalism, which to many are already familiar. However, Rofel argues that far from adopting a prepackaged set of neoliberal practices and cosmopolitan identities, China is engaged in an uncharted and experimental search for a post-Maoist narrative of national coherence. Examining the domains of practice and public culture where macroinstitutional configurations are articulating with and shaping individual subjectivities, Rofel sees the emergence of a new structure of the self in contemporary China. Whereas Chinese subjectivity was once defined by political and class-consciousness, she finds it is now being reconstituted as the seat of individual desire that has the freedom to express its own material, sexual, and affective belongings.The first two sites of national public culture Rofel looks at are the popular television drama Yearnings and an exhibition at the controversial feminist Li Xiaojiang’s women’s museum in Henan, both projects from the early 1990s. Treating the television drama as a cultural artifact “whose meaning was created in the spaces between the soap opera and viewers’ retellings of it,” Rofel traces the interpretations through which viewers engaged the story as “transferable truths” about their own lives (p. 41). She finds contested notions of national and personal value in heated debates over which protagonist was best qualified to represent the post-Mao nation. These competing narratives were alike, however, in fostering a particular art of longing that was only nascent at the time. This longing was one in which “the individual body replaced the collective body as the unit of measurement for productivity and deserved wealth” – and which thus foregrounded and foreshadowed the personal experiments and the neoliberal policies to come (p. 53).Rofel’s trajectory is ethnographically enriched and conceptually elaborated in her subsequent chapters on gendered and sexual identities in the late 1990s. Disrupting the idea that “neoliberal coherences” (p. 110) of identity, practice, and culture have been uniformly imported and effortlessly embraced, Rofel examines how coherent narratives of the desiring nation and the self have only emerged through a contingent process of personal and public negotiation. She finds that rather than adopting a singular form of “global gayness” (p. 96), for instance, gay men in China are constructing their sexual identities between transcultural engagements with foreign discourses and people on the one hand, and “intense desires for cultural belonging, or cultural citizenship in China” on the other (p. 89). Alongside expressions of homosexual identity as a universal human nature newly freed from Chinese socialist repression, one thus also finds an intense concern with the meaning of “Chineseness” (p. 96). Rofel examines this articulation in the domains of gay kinship, terminology, and contests over the relative suzhi or quality of lovers as opposed to “money boys” (p. 104). As foreshadowed in the controversies sparked by Yearnings, cultural citizenship emerges here as something more than a politics of Chinese identity, since individuals are competing in fact for positions in new hierarchies of cultural competence.Another site of cultural competition for Rofel is the figure of the heterosexual female consumer. Here, Rofel shifts her analysis to the production of cosmopolitanism – a term she uses to refer not to a deterritorialized force that is universalizing “the place of no place,” but to particular “ways of ‘worlding’ China, of placing China in a re-imagined world” (p. 112). If consumption is a practice of embodying new identities, Rofel finds it connected to “structured forgettings” (p. 123) by which a younger generation of Chinese women create the socialist past as a locality that they have been empowered to leave behind. Whereas self-sacrificing mothers were domesticated by politics, kinship, and communalism, their daughters are self-desiring – free individuals who transcend locality with their cosmopolitan consumption habits. Yet Rofel also finds claims upon the female body as the figure of Chineseness, as the body desired by and reproductive of the nation. Like their gay male contemporaries, heterosexual female identities for Rofel are generated by a “contradiction [between] transcending China to become a cosmopolitan self and domesticating cosmopolitanism within China” (p. 129).The freshest ethnography and perhaps the most conceptually engaging moments of Rofel’s text are to be found in the penultimate chapter of her book, which describes the fuzziness of the law in new domains of public life and property. Rofel suggests that the desiring self is constituted within a new geometry of tensions. In legal debates around homosexuality, intellectual property, and consumer fraud, she argues that:a triangular relationship has been constructed in China among repression, which signifies the inhibition of human nature; interests, which signify self-regulation; and passion, which signifies excess. Between repression and passion lies socialism, while between passion and interests lies capitalism. The dilemma for China is to find the proper balance between interests and passions. (pp. 139–40)Rofel’s theory is inspired by historian Albert O. Hirschman’s work on the origin of capitalist ideas in seventeenth-century Europe. In The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 1996[1977]), Hirschman argues that medieval Christian political philosophy attempted to curb the ruling aristocracy’s destructive passions for glory, power, and pleasure, by setting against it the idea of “the interests” as the totality of human desire that necessarily includes calculation and reflection on the means by which desire is pursued (p. 139). Transposing this model into post-Mao China, Rofel finds socialist political passions similarly being countered by a notion of rational interest that favors a predictable and politically neutered mode of commerce. In the case of China, however, desire must be cultivated to fuel interests, even as these interests are set against passions. The unpredictable potential of desire to swing either way produces the need for constant governance, particularly in the legal arena. The ambiguous status of homosexuality and the case of a man who made a business of buying fraudulent products to profit from the compensation are but two of Rofel’s delectable examples regarding questions of desire and governance.As a critique of the current literature on neoliberalism, Rofel’s work goes far in illuminating that aspect of subjectivity that is desire in relation to public culture, rather than rationality in relation to technologies of power. This is a neglected aspect of “neoliberal subjectification” (p. 20). However, it is not quite the case that existing work on neoliberalism (of which Rofel cites Wendy Brown, Nikolas Rose, and Aihwa Ong) neglects to answer “the obvious question [of] why anyone would accept neoliberalism as the ruling order?” (p. 20). Rofel argues that Brown, Rose, and Ong “all leave us with individuals responding to a general structure of power,” whereas “[her] argument, in contrast, is that neoliberalism in China is a national project about global reordering” (p. 20). Though her focus on the relations between individual narratives and national public culture is insightful, one wonders if an even more robust theory of “how China became the subject of neoliberalism” would not be achieved by considering them together with, rather than against, concepts of governmentality that also relate the individual to the whole. Finally, while Rofel traces rather than assumes the historical and contingent process through which “‘desiring China’ begins to appear as if it exists as a coherent project” (p. 94), her remarkable success in achieving this goal must leave readers wondering if it is not perhaps the sustained and sustainable incoherences that anthropology must unpack, to understand the meaning of self and desire in China today.