HOPE AGAINST HOPES

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Abstract Born and bred in the Netherlands, Diana Zhu, at 15 years of age, won a Chinese singing contest in Amsterdam in 2006. Subsequently, she got a contract first from Warner Music Hong Kong, then from Warner Taiwan. Relocated to Shanghai, her parents' 'home' city, Diana was working on her hope for a future in the Chinese pop market. This essay is my inquiry on the problematic of hope engendered by and embedded in the intersubjectivity between Diana and me. Taking my cues from Lash and Lury's method of 'following the object', I followed one person. I followed Diana and started to see her entanglement – particularly over her language, music and body – not only with Warner Music, but more fundamentally with the wider dynamics that seeks to configure and maintain a sense of hopefulness in the same Chinese society where inequality, injustice and inhumanity are threatening the 'harmonious society' the political establishment has been campaigning for. Through this journey with Diana, I aim to do two things. First, I aim to show, if we are to understand the complex relationship between the diasporic, the popular and the political in contemporary China, one possibility is to recuperate two sets of narratives – migration and modernity – and read them side by side in connection with hope. Second, I take this metonymic account as part and parcel of a critical Cultural Studies project that has such inequality, injustice and inhumanity in the heart of its politics and practices. I am trying to underwrite this story about Diana's hope with my own hope, against other hopes, that are constructed, circulated and transformed to serve the interests of the state and the capital. Hope management, I will argue, is a key site of political struggle if we want to see a better China in the future. Keywords: Chinese diasporapopular music industrytransnationalismmodernityhopethe Netherlands Notes 1. For a discussion on hope and space in a more specific sense of urban environment, see Harvey (2000 Harvey, D. 2000. Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [Google Scholar]). 2. 'Harmonious society' (hexie shehui), and the urgency to build a harmonious socialist society, was proposed by Chinese president Hu Jintao when he became general secretary of the Communist Party in 2002. Since then, the term has been gaining increasing currency both in political and popular discourses. While members of political elite often mobilize the term and its 'advantages' to silence dissident voices, it has become an almost vacuous or even satirical expression in popular discourses. 3. As if to underwrite the continuing thrust of thinking popular culture as resistance, a new Chinese-language book was just published detailing the protesting tradition in Western popular music. See Chang (2010 Chang, T. 2010. Shidai di zaoyin: cong dilun dao U2 de dikang zhiyin [Noise of the Times: The Protesting Sound from Dylan to U2], Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press. [Google Scholar]). 4. When I started writing lyrics, I often discussed with my A&R colleagues, mostly with musical backgrounds, on matters related to music. These days (or these years) when we talk, they lament the dominance of Artist Management in the Chinese music industry. Managers tend to concern less about production of music than production of a star, and the capacity to generate 'real' income in product endorsement and acting in films. My A&R colleagues often joke that we are no longer producing songs but commercial jingles to promote the star. New songs, they say, are meant to create free airplay, publicity and talking points for the star to stay in profile. 5. All my interviews were conducted in the language the interviewees preferred, either in Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese. They were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Translations to English were mine. Interviewees gave their explicit consent to recording and using their real names for this inquiry. 6. Names in Chinese are written in the way they are spoken, that is family name first. 7. Originally a Confucian term, xiaokang society was cited by the late Chinese reform leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to refer to a modestly well off society, one of the goals of modernization to be achieved by the end of the last century. For detailed accounts of Deng's China in the 1980s, see Wang (1996 Wang, J. 1996. High Culture Fever – Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 8. In her study of Chinese diaspora in Germany, Maggie Leung observes two stereotypes. The German-Chinese are generally perceived not only as restaurant workers but also as criminals (2004). 9. It is interesting to note that even in the USA, a nation proud of its democracy of the American dream and a melting pot of multiculturalism, the single Chinese (and Asian, for that matter) candidate who managed to use the American version of Idols to launch a career in popular music was William Hung. Commenting on Hung's nerdishness, bad teeth, and 'fresh-off-the-boat' accent, a number of observers have argued that his career was a sign of mockery, and that the media exploited him as a joke rather than as a musical talent (see for instance, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/04/06/eguillermo.DTL). 10. My primary goal here is not to problematize Diana's desire to go to China, but to follow her trajectory and understand the processes involved. For works that seek to problematize the diasporic desire to 'return home', see for instance, Ang (2001 Ang, I. 2001. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West, London, Routledge. [Google Scholar]). 11. For a more detailed account of the fall and rise of Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop, see A. Y. H. Fung (2007 Fung, A. Y. H. 2007. The emerging (national) popular music culture in China. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 8(3): 425–437. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 12. The shift towards the use of Mandarin is also noticeable among diasporic Chinese communities, for instance, in Southeast Asia. Particularly indicative was the introduction of Speak Mandarin Campaign as early as 1979 by the Singaporean state, where other Chinese 'dialects' including Cantonese were officially disapproved (Bockhorst-Heng 1999 Bockhorst-Heng, W. 1999. "Singapore's Speak Mandarin Campaign: language ideological debates in the imagining of the nation". In Language Ideological Debates, Edited by: Blommaert, J. 235–266. , Berlin and New York, Mouton de Gruyter. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 13. I know of at least one pop radio station in Hong Kong adopting a (subtle) policy not to promote mandarin songs. For a discussion on my attempt as a lyric writer to interrupt the powerful totality of Chineseness by inserting a 'Southern' identification, see Chow (2009b). 14. It is worth noting that the so-called China Wind (zhongguofeng) pop, and its explicit mobilization, reification and celebration of dominant versions of (particularly Confucianist, masculinist and nationalist) Chinese culture was initiated and mainly popularized by Taiwan-based stars (Chow and de Kloet 2011 Chow , Y. F. & De Kloet , J. 2011 Blowing in the China Wind: engagements with Chineseness in Hong Kong's zhongguofeng music videos , Visual Anthropology , vol. 24, pp. 59–76 .[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). 15. Just the other day I heard a mandarin Chinese song penned by me, 'Go downstream'(xialiu), was requested by mainland censors to change its title. The song, performed by Hong Kong star Anthony Wong, invokes an image to going downstream, instead of upstream, proposing thereby a counter-narrative to the success logic of upward mobility. Xialiu, in Chinese, also suggests something indecent. 16. For a discussion on alternative modernities, read Gaonkar (2001 Gaonkar , D. P. 2001 Alternative Modernities , Duke University Press , Durham, NC . [Google Scholar]). 17. Original texts in Chinese were translated to English by me. 18. To underline this obsession, a term 'career line' was recently coined and has been gaining increasing currency in Chinese societies. Referring to the cleavage of woman's breasts, the term suggests, simply, the bigger the breasts, the deeper the cleavage, the stronger the line, and therefore the more successful a woman's career would become. 19. One of the possible rewriting projects, I suspect, is to flatten diasporic experience to feed into transnational Chinese nationalism. For instance, Leehom Wang, in his remix of 'Descendants of the Dragon', was invoking the biography of his parents who moved from Taiwan to the USA, and conflating their nostalgia with nationalistic sentiments embedded in this classic number.