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Vicente Rafael, Duterte’s Phallus: On the Aesthetics of Authoritarian Vulgarity

Editor’s note: On the eve of the Presidential elections in the Philippines, we asked a few scholars to write about what they perceive to be the stakes. Here is Vicente L. Rafael, History Department, University of Washington, in an excerpt from his newly-published The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (Duke University Press, 2022)

Obscenity is an integral part of the stylistics of power…The penis [is] a historical phenomenon in its own right. …The [autocrat] thinks and expresses himself through his phallus…Without a phallus, the [autocrat] is nothing, has no fixed identity. Thanks to his phallus, the [autocrat’s] cruelty can stand quite naked: erect.

                                                            –Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 115; 175

One of the ways by which President Rodrigo Duterte had laid claim to both national and global attention is through his stories and jokes. Duterte is widely known for his irreverence and bawdy humor that constitute important elements of his governing style. His stories reveal a reliance on invective and an obsession with obscenity. He also makes frequent references to genitalia–his as well those of his critics to the delight of his listeners. He revels in what Achille Mbembe calls an aesthetic of vulgarity that has the effect of establishing a relationship of “conviviality” between himself and his audience. What results is an “intimate tyranny,” much of it centered on the tales of his phallus as it encounters the world.

For example, in a campaign stop at a large sports complex in Quezon City in 2016, Duterte told a story that reverberated around the world. While he was a mayor of Davao, there occurred a bloody prison siege in Davao City in 1989. Among the dead was one of the hostages taken by the prisoners, a 36-year old Australian missionary, Jacqueline Hamill. According to Duterte, she, along with the other women hostages, was repeatedly raped by the prisoners before being killed. But rather than evoke pathos, the sight of the Hamill’s corpse stirs desire in the mayor:

All the women were raped so during the first assault, because they retreated, the bodies they used as shields, one of them was the corpse of the Australian woman lay minister. Tsk, this was a problem. When the bodies were brought out, they were wrapped. I looked at her face, son of a bitch, she looked like a beautiful American actress. Son of a bitch, what a waste. What came to mind was, they raped her, they took turns. I was angry because she was raped, that’s one thing. But she was so beautiful, the mayor should have gone first. Son of a bitch (putang ina), what a waste (sayang). (in Taglish, my translation)

Hamill’s rape and death is used by Duterte as a set up for a joke about himself, more specifically, about the arousal and frustration of his lust. He sees her dead body and her beautiful face, and he feels that he should’ve been the first in line to assault her. Instead, he comes too late and so isn’t able to come at all. It is his failure to assert his claim on the woman’s body that is presumably taken by his audience as the object of hilarity. Seeing her dead body fills him neither with rage nor grief, but with desire that cannot be fulfilled. He is unable to discharge his authority, as it were. The horror of the scene is thus displaced into a story of about a mayor lamenting the failure of his phallic power. Rather than an erectile victory, the story ends with the punch line, “sayang”, what a pity, preceded by the cuss word, “putang ina.”

But all is not lost. Duterte’s disclosure of desire unfulfilled and phallic authority undercut produces a payback. The audience laughs, and their laughter compensates him for his lost power. It returns to him both the pleasure and authority that dead prisoners and the woman’s corpse had deprived him of. Unable to pull rank, the mayor is nonetheless rewarded with the people’s recognition of his narrative performance. Reports of the story drew sharp rebukes from feminists, human rights advocates, the Australian and US embassy and many other quarters. But among the electorate, his popularity soared. Horrifying his critics but delighting his supporters with his pungent shamelessness, Duterte’s bad language and obscene stories were crucial in propelling him to the presidency.

In tracking his jokes, we can see a set of obsessions built around the question: Who gets to own the phallus? Who gets to wield it and for what purpose? Here, the phallus should be understood less as a biological thing synonymous with the penis as a symbolic weapon for asserting autocratic authority and patriarchal prerogatives over women and men alike. Like guns, cars or wealth, the phallus can be used to impress and to threaten, to unify and disperse, to induce pleasure but also coerce submission. Duterte routinely threatens to castrate his opponents even as he repeatedly asserts? his generous endowment. Used to avenge imagined hurts and shore up a fragile ego, Duterte’s phallus proved effective in shutting down his opposition.

The presidential phallus, however, is far from being an unassailable force. As we saw in the rape story above, it can also be blunted by other men and the woman whose death frustrated Duterte’s assertion of his privileges. Indeed, Duterte is notorious for joking about rape as a way of re-asserting his ability to police women’s behavior and enlist men into affirming the sexism that buttresses his authoritarian imagination. Hence, when critics point out that contrary to his claims, crime in Davao while he was a mayor had gone up, especially rape, he retorts that wherever there are beautiful women, there will be plenty of rape. Along the same lines, he also spoke approvingly of men who had “the balls” to rape candidates for Miss Universe in exchange for facing certain punishment. Women are raped not simply because they are women for Duterte; it is because they are “beautiful.” It is as if their beauty is a challenge that has to be faced down, a provocation that must be put in its proper place, under the rule and in the service of the phallus.

In joking about rape, Duterte upholds patriarchal norms and sexist attitudes by wielding what the philosopher Kate Manne calls the “cudgel” of misogyny. And that cudgel is the phallus, at once “combative” and “anxious,” always wary of challenges and eager to assert itself. One particularly disturbing story that illustrates the coercive role of misogyny involves Duterte encouraging soldiers, when confronted with Communist female fighters, to spare their lives but to shoot them in the vagina: “There’s a new order coming from mayor. We won’t kill you. We will just shoot your vagina. So that…if she has no vagina she would be useless.” Shooting them in their vagina was, in a way, taking away what made them “women.” It was the punishment for taking up arms and defying the State. It amounted to “castrating” those who challenged the patriarchal norms integral to the exercise of its authority. Hence, we see how Duterte’s misogyny is directed not at every woman, but at particular women who attempt to seize the phallus for themselves, daring to go against his political and sexual authority.

One last revealing example of Duterte’s power of storytelling: his tale of being sexually abused at the age of 14 by an American Jesuit priest during confession. He often returns to this story as a way of casting aspersions on the Catholic Church that had been critical of his human rights abuses. Folded into this story, however, is another: his sexual abuse of their household help (which he later confesses was fabricated). Here what we see is a double confession—Duterte to the priest and to the audience–and a double assault: the priest’s on Duterte and Duterte’s on the maid. The two acts of violation turn out to be intimately related whereby the priest’s assault of Duterte becomes a means for the latter’s domination of his audience. He has frequently told these stories on various occasions, usually in a mix of Taglish, Bisaya and English.

Duterte recalls going to Friday confession while a freshman at the elite boys’ school Ateneo de Davao. In vivid detail, he tells of how the priest held on to his genitals as he forced him to tell more stories of his sinfulness. The longer the stories went, the more Duterte found himself captive in the confessional to the desires of the priest. One of these stories involved the young Duterte confessing to molesting his sleeping maid by inserting his finger in her vagina while she was asleep, then proceeding to the bathroom to masturbate not once but twice. Later on, Duterte claimed that the scene with the maid never happened. He made it up under pressure from the priest’s demand for more stories so he could continue molesting him.

Many of Duterte’s stories are arguably confessional to the extent that they are about exposing what usually stays hidden, bringing to light what otherwise remains in darkness. The subject who speaks is also the subject who is spoken about as s/he reveals the history of their sinful acts to a priest who in turn dispenses penance in the name of God. As the mediator of divine forgiveness, the priest exercises an inordinate power over the penitent, registering the penitent’s debts and prescribing the penance with which to cancel these. However, in Duterte’s telling, the very act of confession is subverted. It is no longer meant to seek forgiveness and acknowledge someone else’s authority but precisely to ridicule it. In his oft-told story about his abuse at the hands of Catholic priests as a teenager, Duterte reveals the priest’s concupiscence, showing how confession becomes a vehicle not for forgiveness but for clerical abuse. Confession breeds obscenity rather than divine dispensation, making for an uncanny encounter between priest and penitent. What emerges in the experience of confession for the penitent—here a young boy—is the return of the repressed in familiar form: the predator as father. From the perspective of the boy, the father’s demands appear autocratic. He cannot be refused. His lust for the boy requires that the latter must stay longer in the confessional, making up sins in order to satisfy the priest.

To comply with the priest’s demands, Duterte makes up a story about “fingering” their housemaid, then masturbating in the bathroom. He evokes a circle of touching: while the priest fondles his genitals, Duterte talks about foisting himself on the genitals of the woman as she sleeps, then subsequently fondling himself. His story connects these improper connections into a sequence of submission and mastery that yields pleasure and laughter. The trauma of sexual abuse for Duterte at the hands of the priest is transmuted into the excitement of probing the maid’s genitals then mastering, as it were, his own. In the end, the priest waves him off with a few feckless prayers, assuring him of eternal damnation. Rather than a site for the contrition and divine forgiveness, confession here is converted into a kind of pornographic machine for the reproduction of sadistic male pleasures. Duterte’s exposure and disempowerment by someone above become the conditions for overpowering someone below. He thus reverses his position from being abused to being the abuser, from a position of submission to one of domination, from one of fear to one of satisfaction and release. But only at the expense and through the exploitation of a subordinate other.

And what of his audience? Feminists, human rights advocates, the Church hierarchy and other critics of Duterte reacted with anger. They decried his misogyny at making light of sexual abuse as consistent with his disregard for human rights. Others were scandalized by his “indecency” and filthy language, his lack of “delicadeza,” or civilized behavior. In other words, they read Duterte’s obscenity in the way that he had meant it: as an unremitting war on social conventions.

Judging from the transcripts and the videos, however, those who were present at his speeches reacted differently. They applauded his stories and laughed at his jokes. Why? Freud once posed this question. When we laugh at jokes, what are we laughing at? Are we responding to the technique of joke-telling or to the content of the joke, or to both? It is never clear, he says, to the extent that jokes, like dreams, are fulfillments of the same wish: to evade repression. The political significance of jokes, the fact that they go against the grain of the reasonable and the normal, would seem to make them valuable resources for the oppressed seeking to overthrow the weight of authority. Mikhail Bakhtin further argues that medieval celebrations like the carnival and modern literary forms like the novel were sites for this upending of hierarchy through satire, disguise and social inversions. The high is brought down low and the low is elevated, especially parts of the body and its functions.

Bribing his audience, Duterte is like a smuggler of illicit goods, promising forbidden pleasures and overturning repressive strictures. He says what they would’ve have wanted to say but could not. Their laughter could thus be read as a sign of their identification with Duterte’s efforts to find a way out of his suffering at the hands of the priest with a tale about abusing the maid who nonetheless remains unaware of her violation. They delight in his resistance and at his bumbling attempts at mastery that leads to some sort of self-recovery. Decades later when he tells this story, he is no longer a boy but the president of the country. Occupying the heights of power, he is capable of commanding attention wherever he goes with whatever he says. Duterte’s obscenities feel subversive, but subversion in this context is in the service of an autocratic end where laughter produces an intimacy between ruler and ruled. The vulgarity of his language positions him as a kind of rebel inviting others to join him in his assault on bourgeois sensibilities and norms. But it comes with the condition that the audience must submit to his narrative. Only he can tell the stories and expect their laughter. The reverse is never possible as no one, as far as I know, jokes with Duterte in public. He expects no narrative reciprocity, no return with interest, but only a kind of passive acceptance of the surplus of stories he gives you. There is thus nothing democratic in Duterte’s humor. Instead, the pleasure that the audience gets from his jokes is intrinsically linked to their willingness to participate in the imaginative violation of others, especially women. Whether he seeks revenge or release, Duterte’s tales seek to assert his phallic power over his enemies while simultaneously subordinating and overpowering his audience.

In looking at the narrative structure of his jokes, we see how it hinges not only on classic techniques of joke-telling—those of condensation and displacement, as in dreams. It is also productive of a hierarchy of listening whereby Duterte as the teller monopolizes the time and the language of telling. As part of the audience, you have no choice but to wait for him—and he is always late—then listen to him take his time unspooling his tales. Unable to leave without drawing his ire, you remain a captive audience. Jokes then become a way of establishing his authority. He exposes himself, renders himself vulnerable and risks dissolving his authority, but only to recover and re-assert his mastery over the scene of exposure. This dialectic of disclosure and domination allows him to forge a tyranny of intimacy, extracting your consent registered by your laughter. Humor is thus a means of playing out his anxiety while assuaging his fear. Vulgarity is stylized and obscenity performed to release the audience’s inhibitions at defying conventions. But this defiance is bogus and deeply conservative since it always comes with the price of submission to Duterte’s authoritarian imagination.

While laughter creates conviviality and community, it is always shadowed by violence and fear. Duterte recreates in every story something of the tone and texture of his primal scene: the dark confessional where he is held captive by the hands of the American priest. Indeed, his performative shamelessness today may be read the unfinished struggle to master his fear of the father-predator as he attempts to take on the latter’s power for himself. It is precisely that same phallic power that he seeks to grasp and wield when he addresses those he considers critical of him such as women and “lesser” men, and especially abject figures of criminality like drug dealers and users. Recklessly cussing at them, he lusts after their deaths, brooking neither dissent nor opposition.

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Billy Beswick, What Still Flashes Up: Anti-Imperialist Legacies and The Battle of Lake Changjin

Resist America, Aid Korea! 抗美援朝! Goals the grey suits of Hollywood might have inadvertently championed in 2019, when the South Korean anti-capitalist blockbuster Parasite took home four of the top prizes at the Academy Awards, including the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars. Anti-capitalist blockbuster is of course a contradiction in terms, but then contradiction has been at the heart of anti-capitalist struggle since capitalism itself was struggling into existence. When the Japan-based, pro-Pyongyang Korean-language newspaper Choson Sinbo praised Parasite for revealing the true nature of class relations in the ROK following the film’s historic Oscar sweep, the laughably reductionist logics of “enemy x enemy = friend” swam clear into view.[1] Did resistance to the global economic order underpinned by US power put Parasite’s director, Bong Joon-ho, on the side of Kim Jong-un? Could we therefore argue that, in the messy interstices of our international political unconscious, the men and women of the near century-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were, like the citizens of the brand-new People’s Republic of China in the early 1950s, mobilised by that famous rallying cry of anti-imperialism: Resist America, Aid (North) Korea?

The obvious and correct answer –– of course not –– obscures important lessons. These have to do with the ambivalent legacies of socialism and anti-imperialism. The Korean War film The Battle at Lake Changjin, commissioned by the government to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party and released internationally last month (it was released in China on September 30th, on the eve of National Day), gives a good picture of the kinds of ideological work to which these legacies are being put in the contemporary PRC. One can pick out three distinct, though overlapping messages: 1) The revolution was waged in the past to secure peace and stability in the present. 2) China acts only in self-defense against imperialist aggression. 3) The nation demands and commands respect on the world stage. Unpacking how such messages are constructed in the film makes it possible to track alternative, occluded readings. We might thereby find, to lean heavily on the language of Walter Benjamin, some pattern in the wreckage piled at the Angel of History’s feet that can be blasted out of the past and used to orientate us towards a more just future.[2] Doing so doesn’t make the suggestion that Bong and the ladies and gentlemen of the Academy were on the side of the DPRK any less laughable, but it does change what the joke is. Ridicule gives way to the gentle irony at the foundation of any uneasy but necessary alliance –– here, an alliance with the hope embedded in historical actions that does not turn a blind eye to their (frequently violent and counterproductive) real-world effects.

Co-directed by Chen Kaige (foremost among the PRC’s so-called fifth generation of filmmakers) and Hong Kong martial arts and action film directors Tsui Hark and Dante Lam, Lake Changjin opens with a PLA company commander, Wu Qianli, returning to his native village. Played by the imperiously handsome Wu Jing, Qianli’s glorious homecoming in the wake of the nation’s liberation is tempered by the fact that he arrives at his parents’ houseboat carrying his older brother’s ashes. From these ashes, however, as the audience quickly comes to see, rise the promise of a future free from the volatile oscillations of fortune that have characterized the Wu family’s life up until now. The houseboat stands for their rootless, transitory existence, and Qianli promises that, with peace finally secured, he will build them a house on solid ground. Before construction can begin on this metonym for New China, however, he is called away to defend the nation’s borders from the encroaching threat of the United States army, which has just crossed the 38th parallel and is advancing towards the Yalu River. Cut to a meeting in Beijing, where Mao Zedong’s thoughts on the crisis are offered: “Considering only the present, I don’t want to fight this war, but for the sake of the future, for the sake of the peaceful development of the country over the next decades, over the next century, we cannot but fight.” Many more comments like this are made, which emphasize present sacrifice for the sake of the future. That future is now, and the peace to which the audience are being referred is the Pax Communistica of China’s present. (Ying Zhu pointed out in a recent talk based on research from her upcoming book, Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market, that less than 1% of the total profits for PRC-produced commercial films comes from overseas. The audience for the film is therefore clearly domestic, though the participation of two heavyweight Hong Kong directors indexes a desire to draw the boundaries of the “domestic” more widely.)

The international context that the film foregrounds ensures a neat division between disturbers and keepers of the peace. This allows for what Wang Hui would call a “depoliticized” picture of the revolution,[3] one in which the role of the CCP in radically transforming the basic structures of society is underplayed in favor of a view of the Party as guarantor of stability for a historically beleaguered people. Throughout the film, as characters met their grisly fates in the mountains of North Korea, Gong Li’s voice rang in my mind. Her character’s refrain to her husband in Zhang Yimou’s To Live seemed apposite to these soldiers and their loved ones: “I just want to live a peaceful life with you.” But what keeps the couple in Zhang’s film from a peaceful life is not imperialist aggression, it is the utopic experiments of the new regime, causing oscillations in fortune as severe as those from which the nation’s liberation promises to free the Wu family. While To Liveis hardly sympathetic to the revolution –– it ends with a sigh of relief as the nation leaves behind the Maoist past for the ostensible stability of the reform era –– its negative portrayal puts the radicalness of the communist experiment center stage.

Lake Changjin makes only one fleeting reference to land reform, when it is reported that a soldier decided to enlist in the army out of gratitude to the new regime for the land apportioned to his parents. But even this moment places revolution in the past, so that any sense that there is something for which to struggle domestically is completely sublated into a battle for metaphysical sovereignty, untethered from materialist concerns about what, precisely, makes sovereignty worth fighting for in the first place. The Civil War in this telling becomes merely a war to unify the country, not a battle between alternative conceptions of how a just society should be organized. Anti-imperialism is presented therefore not as resistance to the highest stage of capitalism, but as a defense of territorial integrity for its own sake. When an intelligence report mentions General MacArthur visiting Taiwan, and the US Seventh Fleet occupying the Taiwan Strait, there is no mention of the KMT. Eliding the fact that the PLA fought a bloody Civil War not merely to unify the country, but to resist the nation’s incorporation into an unjust economic system, Lake Changjin is able to portray the War to Resist America and Aid Korea as a showdown between white US and Han-Chinese troops. No Koreans appear in the film, and so aiding fellow socialist nation builders drops out of the picture. Resistance becomes all. The way this works is worth pausing over, for it points not only to the priorities of the film but the psychoanalytic logics that underlined PRC history from the very beginning.

When the leaders of the CCP decided that they would not grant minority nationality areas the status of republics within a broader federation –– as the Soviet Union had done –– the reason provided was the need to resist imperialist aggression. As Zhou Enlai’s stated on 7th September 1949:

We advocate national self-rule, but we must prevent imperialists utilizing the nationality question to drive a wedge in the unification of China. For instance, the British imperialist conspiracy in southern Xinjiang and Tibet, and the US imperialist conspiracy on the islands of Taiwan and Hainan.[4]

Concurrent with China’s entry into the Korean War in October 1950, the PLA crossed the Jinsha River and entered Chamdo, in Eastern Tibet.[5] That the PRC was waging a war of anti-imperialist defense at the same time as it was annexing an arguably de facto sovereign nation could, in unsympathetic hands, be used to paint the entire project of liberation as nothing more than a veneer overlaying a Nietzschean will to power. But as the Zhou Enlai quote above makes clear, the same principle of resistance underlay China’s decision to cross both the Yalu and Jinsha Rivers.

This is not meant as an excuse, rather it is an attempt to draw attention to the way resistance works doubly as a motivator for justice and injustice alike. Jacqueline Rose writes that while “in political vocabularies, resistance is the passage to freedom, for psychoanalysis it is repetition, blockage, blind obeisance to crushing internal constraint.”[6] Resistance is not a cover, but a blinker, obscuring the truth of one’s actions from view. What commentators frequently refer to as the “Orwellian” language used to describe the takeover of Tibet –– “peaceful liberation” –– is not unique to the CCP, as the official name for the War on Terror –– “Operation Enduring Freedom” –– makes clear. Both examples point to the way resistance can make imperialist activity possible. The line where self-defense tips over into aggression is murky, and language works to soothe the psyche of a nation that has overstepped the mark.

In an interesting, if historically debatable, article written in response to the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan, Wang Hui points to depoliticization as foundational to the growing strength of identity movements that challenge the PRC’s territorial claims. He cites the importance of land reform in Tibet, which he acknowledged was implemented “violently” and “from the top down”, for cementing the legitimacy of the regime among the peasant population.[7] How seriously the Tibetan peasantry could be said to have accepted CCP rule is the moot point here (statistics are obviously hard to come by, but those refugees that have made their way over the border into India since the Dalai Lama fled in 1959 are not all one-time aristocrats). What is undeniable is that any sense that the liberation of Tibet was geared to some larger vision of justice has been jettisoned for a focus on Tibet’s metaphysical status as a part of China. Such a depoliticized approach to the nationality question was there right from the very beginning; Zhou Enlai says in the above quoted speech that Hainan, Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang “were always within Chinese territory.”[8] But this position once comingled with a sense that the PRC as a state formation would bring about freedom, equality, and democracy for all those under its jurisdiction. These words are still plastered on walls all over the China mainland. Thinking of them as mere Orwellian ruses is to deny them of their power. Lies enjoin no responsibility on their speakers. The same is not true for promises unkept.

Dai Jinhua writes eloquently of the communist legacy as a promise:

the significance of Marxism for social practice is that it promises a form of future justice…Only this can give meaning to past and present victims. For me, this includes the victims and sacrifices of twentieth-century communist movements.[9]

There is something strikingly Benjaminian about this commitment to redeeming the past through present day political action. And this is something that Lake Changjin itself aims to do, in the final moments of the film, when US troops are shown saluting a battalion of dead Chinese snipers, frozen into their positions and covered over with a thin layer of snow. Imperialist regard for the indominable will of the Chinese people seems, in the last analysis, to have been what the war was fought to win. The film thereby suggests that redemption of this past sacrifice requires one to continue to insist on China’s strength, and demand respect for it. This can be linked with depoliticization, and specifically with what Nancy Fraser has analyzed as the general postsocialist shift away from demands for material redistribution and towards demands for recognition.[10] Recognition was always a part of the PRC’s enterprise (hence Mao’s description of the nation’s founding as the moment when its supine and humiliated citizens finally stood up), but to cast the entire communist project as a demand only for the recognition of a particular ethno-national group is no way to do justice to either its martyrs or its victims. 

Pointing to the way Parasite’s anti-capitalist sentiments pull it and its viewers into an alliance with the PRC’s struggle against imperialism in the Korean War is therefore more than a joke. It highlights the fact that a legacy of the war, besides that which underpins ethno-nationalist demands for respect and territorial integrity, remains alive. The hope for a more just future, one which imagines a world built on needs and priorities besides those of capital, still flashes up.  Another example of this is Tibetan director Pema Tseden’s 2015 film Tharlo, which opens with the titular character, a Tibetan herder, reciting the words to Mao’s “Serve the People.” It ends with him setting himself aflame as he comes to see that this is a promise that the state has no interest in keeping. Yet the film is far from hopeless. The Maoist reference throngs silently throughout the film, including in its closing moments. Tharlo’s tragedy is a photographic negative of the possibility that the promise might one day be fulfilled, that the past might still be redeemed.

Billy Beswick is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, where his research is focussed on the relationship between national imaginaries and minority ethnic self-representation in film, art and literature from the PRC and Taiwan.

Notes

[1] “Pro-North Korea daily praises Oscar-winning ‘Parasite’ for ‘exposing’ South Korea’s reality,” Reuters, February 21, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-awards-oscar-parasite-northkorea-idUKKBN20F1CU.

[2] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: The Bodley Head, 2015), 245-255.

[3] See Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (London and New York: Verso, 2009).

[4] Zhou Enlai 周恩來, “Several Questions Relating to the People’s Political Consultative Conference” 關於人民政協的幾個問題. In A Selection of Documents Relating to the Nationality Question: July 1921 –– September 1949民族問題文獻匯編: 一九二一 · 七 –––– 一九四九 · 九, edited by the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party 中共中央統戰部, 1265-1267  (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1991), 1267.

[5] That is, the eastern part of the present day Tibetan Autonomous Region; Chamdo is in the west of the historical Tibetan region of Kham.

[6] Jacqueline Rose, The Last Resistance (London: Verso, 2017), 21.

[7] Wang Hui 汪暉, “The Taiwan Question in the Great Historical Upheaval of Contemporary China” 當代中國歷史巨變中的台灣問題, Culture and Society 人文與社會, 2015 (http://wen.org.cn/modules/article/view.article.php?4172/c8).

[8] Zhou, “Several Questions”, 1267.

[9] Dai Jinhua, After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History, edited by Lisa Rofel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 21.

[10] Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 2.

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Flair Donglai Shi, “Yellow Miracle:” Su Bingtian and the Dilemma of Collective Racial Imagination

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which closed on the 8th of August 2021 after the many delays and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, was a great success for Team China. Having bagged 88 medals, including 38 gold medals, mainland Chinese athletes achieved a new record in terms of their collective performance at Summer Olympic Games held overseas. However, one of the most celebrated and memorable moments for Chinese audiences had nothing to do with medalists. 

It occurred when sprinter Su Bingtian finished with a new personal-best record of 9.83 seconds in the men’s 100m semi-finals on the 1st of August. Only the second athlete from Asia ever to qualify for the finals in this event (after Takayoshi Yoshioka at the 1932 Summer Olympics), Su achieved sixth place, in the end, with another impressive result of 9.98 seconds. The number 9.83 set the entire Chinese nation on fire because it was not only Su’s personal best but also the best result ever achieved by a Chinese man, a man of Asian descent, or a man from what many Chinese still call “the yellow race.” Overnight, a sense of collective, racialized pride began to permeate public articles as well as private conversations, exemplified in phrases like “Yellow Miracle,” “Yellow Pride,” “Fastest Yellow Man,” “Asian Record,” and “China Speed,” which inundated Chinese social media feeds. The core message was clear: the fastest “Asian,” the most outstanding athlete of the “yellow race” in a sport long dominated by other races, is from China, and that is a fact of great historical significance.

Race as a human category, defined by biological and physical features, is in most fields regarded as more or less outdated and has been replaced by interpretations of race as a sociocultural construct. Competitive sports, however, remain one of the fields of concentrated public interest still highly conducive to essentialist conceptualizations of race. The segregationist practice of “racial stacking,” namely assigning players to different positions according to the perceived strengths of their racial and ethnic backgrounds, is often replicated on the discursive level in terms of how certain racial groups are thought to have genetic advantages over others in different sports. For example, within the US, the overrepresentation of African American players in basketball reinforces the sociocultural myth of “black athletic superiority.” Such essentialist thinking, perpetuated by popular books like Jon Entine’s Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk about It (2000), is far from sufficiently problematized in public discourses due to the seemingly positive connotations associated with such racial imaginaries.

Those imaginaries persist despite the numerous myth-busting articles that point out how environmental and socioeconomic factorsoutweigh genetics in longitudinal evaluations of athletic performances. (It is worth noting that in the field of genetics itself, “race” is a null concept, considered to be of very limited use if useful at all.) Racialized tropes in sports also persist despite evidence of the detrimental effects such myths have on African American athletes, especially how their individual hard work is often dismissed in the name of race and how African American children still have limited accesses to a more diverse range of sport activities, facilities, and training due to their disadvantaged socioeconomic position. The myth of race persists despite the fact that it reinforces the racist logic that underlies notions such as “Asian brain” versus “Black brawn.” Such racial binaries negatively affect athletes because, if the overrepresentation of African Americans in certain sports is justified by race and genetics, then the continued underrepresentation and exclusion of Asian American players in the same sports can be ignored as somehow reasonable and acceptable as well. Moreover, as competitive sports are also charged with imaginaries of desirable masculinities, the “black athletic superiority” myth sustains the racial-sexual axis of contemporary American society, where media representations fetishize black men as hypersexual while consistently desexualizing Asian men.

A similar version of the same myth also exists in China, and common belief in the importance of the “racial factor” in international sports informed the collective significance that Chinese people saw in Su Bingtian’s success. In Chinese media and everyday conversations alike, it is not uncommon to hear assertions about the racial advantages that Chinese athletes “naturally” enjoy in sports that draw upon “agility and technique,” such as diving, badminton, and table tennis. As for the recent successes in weightlifting achieved by East Asian athletes, one theory purports that this can be explained by the fact that East Asians have shorter arms compared to other races. The biological determinism underpinning these racial discourses also means that whenever a Chinese athlete delivers a record-breaking performance in a sport deemed “unsuited” or “disadvantageous” for East Asians, such as the various events in track and field, he or she is bound to receive extra praise for surpassing the “racial limit” of that particular sport.

National excitement for Su did not emerge in 2021. In 2015, at the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Oregon, he had already generated a buzz in China for clocking a historic 9.99 seconds in the 100m competition, which made him the first Asian to have overcome the 10-second barrier hitherto deemed insurmountable for Asian athletes. Prior to 2015, the category of “Asian” in discussions of the 100m race was already racialized but in ways that did not straightforwardly correspond to geo-national designations. The first “Asian” sprinter to break the 10-second barrier was the Nigerian-born Femi Ogunode, who represented Qatar at the 2014 Asian Games. Although representing a country deemed to be part of “Asia” for the purposes of the Asian Games, Ogunode was not viewed as a “real Asian,” precisely because competitive sports are conceptualized as not only international, but often as tacitly inter-racial, competition. Even if Ogunode were of Arab descent, his record would still occupy a peripherical position in both the global Anglophone and Sinophone imaginations of “Asian” athletes. Like the identity label “Asian American,” the labels “Asian” and its Chinese equivalent “yazhouren,” are typically used to refer to East Asians, and at times South Asians (mostly in the UK, Southern Africa, and North America).

The celebratory conflation of “China Speed,” “Asian Record,” and “Yellow Miracle” reinforce the collective view of the Olympic Games as the biggest of the interracial competitions conducted in the name of nation states. The otherwise progressive (self-)representations of the multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural compositions of many of these nation states do not contradict the highly racialized lens through which sporting events are viewed. But rather, they reiterate the entrenched perceptions of racial difference internal to the nation building process. The athletic exceptionalism that makes Su representative of some imaginary “yellow race” is based on the essentialist differences that are perceived to exist between the “yellow,” “white,” and “black” races in the popular Chinese imagination. Notably, the hashtag “Su Bingtian surpassed all white men” soon became popular on the social media site weibo after the Chinese sprinter, now fondly dubbed “Sushen (God Su),” qualified for the final on the 1st of August. Media reports were also quick to note that Su would be the only non-black athlete to compete in the final match and highlighted this racial exceptionality with much national pride and excitement.

The collective affect of racial pride, generated by Su’s record-breaking performance, is inherently paradoxical. On the one hand, by celebrating the fact that a yellow man can indeed beat all white men in a sport that has hitherto rendered Asian men unsuitable and thus invisible due to their race, Chinese commentators seem to have proven the irrelevance of race as a categorical force in international sports. On the other hand, by emphasizing the fact that Su was the only non-black athlete to compete in the final race, the myth of “black athletic superiority” was once again taken for granted, resulting in the persistent, tacit dismissal of the hard work of athletes of African heritage in the popular Chinese racial imagination.

Apart from this persistent racial stereotyping of black athletes, the widespread excitement about Su Bingtian’s achievements as a “yellow” man also exposes a certain discursive dilemma in the collective racial imagination and self-identification within China. As scholars like Michael Keevak and Yinghong Cheng have pointed out, “yellow” as an arbitrary racial label was an invention of 19th century European pseudo-sciences, especially racial taxonomy and physical anthropology. Perceived as a sickly and menacing color, “yellow” was assigned to the so-called “Mongoloid” or “Mongolian race,” evoking long-standing European fears and traumas about invasions from the East. The colonialist and racist histories of these terms explain why “yellow” is rendered obsolete and offensive in most Western public discourses; almost all the common phrases associating yellowness with race are negative, such as “Yellow Peril,” “Yellowface,” and “Yellow Fever.”

Many Chinese scholars have also noted this negativity and called for Chinese athletes to stop using the term “huangzhongren (yellow man)” for self-identification. But such efforts have had little to no effect on the popularity of yellowness in Chinese discourses regarding international sports. This is because yellowness as a collective racial identity also has a long history of localization in China and was embedded in the nation’s initial modernization process, which took place in the early 20th century. While “Mongolian” was not accepted as a self-identifier by most Chinese, as the term named only one, specific ethnicity among the many ethnic groups living in China, “yellow” was enthusiastically embraced by many late-Qing officials and early Republican intellectuals like Chen Tianhua, Zou Rong, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, and Pan Guangdan. “Yellow” as a racial color got a lackluster reception in Japan, but in China, yellowness was immediately linked to its long and auspicious role in traditional Chinese culture, as in “the Yellow Emperor,” “Yellow Plateau,” and “Yellow River.” Its older, positive associations help explain why in China today, identifying as “yellow” is not only politically correct but also signifies a unique form of regionalism that seems to transcend national boundaries but at the same time serves to reinforce a Sinocentric view of East Asia.

Contemporary imaginations of yellowness in China perpetuate the simplistic constructions of the global racial hierarchy that early modern Chinese intellectuals adopted from 19th century European thought. That hierarchy puts “white” at the top and “black” at the bottom, with “yellow” and all the “other colored” races in between. The idea of a “white-yellow race war,” imagined by Liang Qichao more than a century ago, persists through a kind of developmentalist competition, wherein Su Bingtian beating all the white athletes in the Olympic semi-finals constitutes but one manifestation of this updated and more abstract version of a race war. The persistence of the hierarchy also sustains the view of blackness and Africanness as animalistic and backward, thus rendering nearly impossible the idea that a “yellow man” might beat a black athlete in a physical sport like sprinting. Nevertheless, Chinese audiences remain eagerly hopeful that such a “yellow miracle” might occur in the years to come. To paraphrase Franz Fanon, if the “yellow” man loses, it is because of his race; if he wins, it is in spite of his race. Either way, he is locked into the infernal circle.

Notably, in the English language, the concepts “white,” “black,” and to a lesser degree “brown,” have all been retained, and are often used as self-identifiers, in public discourses to discuss interracial relations. The political incorrectness of the term “yellow,” and the lack of a concise, inclusive, and racially conscious replacement, can mean that East Asians and those of East Asian descent living outside the region can sometimes feel that they have been denied a similar opportunity to participate in discussions of racism in the more straightforward way that is afforded by such simplistic but powerful “color” categories. At the same time, the racial nationalism channeled through a Sinocentric view of representative yellowness has only been intensifying in the context of rising geopolitical tensions between China and the US in the last decade, and Su’s racial iconicity certainly appears as Liu Xiang redux for many Chinese and China watchers.

While it is easy to deconstruct “yellow” as a historical myth of racist origin and discriminatory function, it is a lot more difficult to find a way to build a strategic collective identity for East Asians based on shared memories and experiences of white supremacy and anti-racist resistance. The complicated discursive life of “yellowness” highlights the tensions between the epistemic violence of racial invisibility in the English language and the uncritical advocacy of racial nationalism in the Chinese language. These tensions, exposed by Su Bingtian’s Olympic success, are likely to remain unresolved and to emerge once again when the next “yellow miracle” comes along.

 

(An earlier, shorter version of this article has been published by Sixth Tone, and I thank the dedicated staff there for their editorial work and for allowing me to publish the full version here.)

Flair Donglai SHI is a researcher in comparative literature, focusing on the “Yellow Peril,” world literature, and China-Africa cultural relations.

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Ping Sun, From Platform Economies to Platform Justice

Translated by Shiqi Lin

Translator’s notes: This essay was originally published in Chinese for the “Trading Thoughts” column of thepaper.cn (澎湃思想市场) on May 23, 2021. Upon consultation with the author and the positionspolitics editorial team, this English version has been edited for length and has added explanatory contexts to theoretical and popular lexicons such as the “poverty of meaning” and “involution” (内卷).

With the rise of Chinese technology firms such as Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and Meituan, the past few years have witnessed the explosive growth of platform economies in China. However, much is still under-examined about the complexities of platform ecologies within China: How has China grown to be one of the largest players in platform economies in the world? How are platform economies entangled with and how do they exacerbate existing problems of migration, labor, inequality, relational poverty, and technological governance? What is the everyday experience of living in platform economies, negotiating with it, and searching to break the systemic impasse? Ever since the publication and wide circulation of an online journalistic article, “Delivery Workers, Trapped in the System” (外卖骑手，困在系统里) in September 2020, these questions have become centers of public and scholarly concern in China. In this article, Dr. Ping Sun, a leading scholar on digital labor and platform studies, offers her observations on this digital crisis. Just as the world is going through the acceleration of platformization during and after COVID-19, Dr. Sun’s words are both timely and prescient for and beyond China.

 

After a car accident some time ago, a rideshare driver took stacked orders to make up his deficit. In order to complete the orders in time, he took a shortcut which set off an alarm. The location alerts sent by the rideshare system triggered panic in his female passenger, which eventually led to her tragically jumping from the moving car. In the ensuing investigation report, one line stands out in particular: “From the investigation on its own, this is apparently a story of mutual destruction about two people living hard lives.”

What is disheartening in this story of mutual destruction is that there was no dispute, only silence. Both the driver and the passenger chose to trust the rideshare system instead of each other. Therefore, the guidance of the system replaced human communication and, ultimately, human trust. The problem is: when we get in a rideshare such as Didi, we have no interest in knowing who the driver is; just as when we order take-out, we have no clue how the food delivery man arrives at our door; or when we get a house cleaner, we have no idea where the auntie[1] comes from and where she is going.

Technological systems have trapped us all in a dilemma. Technology has lost its order and direction on its way to advancement, a technological “disorder” that, to a large extent, has become a condition of the “disorder of meanings” in modern societies. When humans are locked by automation technologies in relationships of specific settings and chances, and when they can do nothing but play the roles assigned to them, what comes after is not a longing for relation building, but repulsion.

According to political theorist Langdon Winner, the process of technological development is autonomous. It can break free from human control and become self-determining through “technological drift.” Unfortunately, with today’s platform economies, Winner’s statement is becoming reality. As digital platforms are developing at full speed, we seem to have lost our control over the pace of technological development. Algorithms and artificial intelligence are gradually “disembedding” our social lives, hijacking, alienating, and eroding the existences and lives of human beings.

The Loss of the Meaning of Labor

Karl Marx wrote that labor is a basic characteristic of human beings. However, in the context of platform economies, the meaning of labor is called into question. “Who would want to do this job if not for survival?” This sentiment came up repetitively from the platform workers my team interviewed.

Interestingly, none of these workers has real difficulty making ends meet, but almost everyone feels very poor. This kind of poverty is not really a form of economic poverty defined by the struggle for food, housing, or basic needs; it is a form of relational poverty, emotional poverty, and communication poverty. To put it differently, this is what anthropologist Biao Xiang calls the “poverty of meaning” (意义贫穷), a crisis in economic structure that alienates workers from the meaningfulness of their own labor.

We can hardly find joy in labor anymore. Perhaps we miss the feeling of fulfillment experienced by workers in the Socialist period of industrial mass production, who sweated but smiled. That sense of fulfillment and enthusiasm appears to have been replaced by a social perception of “no future” and what is commonly called “Sang culture” (丧文化), a societal mood of languishing and apathy contagious  among young people in China today.

Why labor has lost meaning is complex, but the reasons have a strong relationship to the stigmatization of platform labor, whose workers are constructed by social discourse as the “Other.” The “Other” here refers to not only the blue-collar workers working for digital platforms, such as couriers, food delivery workers, and porters for bike-sharing companies, but also to the programmers, coordinators, operators, managers, and designers in big corporations, Internet companies, and platform businesses. The logic of “othering” is simple: the current discourse on platform labor is constructed around “consumption” and “exhaustion.” This commercialized logic of platform development has transformed the entire society into a crucible, turning every individual into a piece of firewood thrown into the pot for burning and exhausting.

“Silky Service” and the “Cultivation of Laziness”

An important feature of the platform economy is its reorganization of social relations. This reorganization includes two levels: first, the identity of platform participants is redefined and divided into consumers and workers; second, the existing social networks of platform participants are expanded into new relationships and contracts that did not exist before. For example, on ride-hailing platforms, those who send and receive orders are divided into “passengers” and “drivers” with respective duties and responsibilities. Through the mediation of technology, “random encounters” between people may happen anytime and anywhere, but long-term relationships are harder to maintain.

At the same time, in such a multi-party chain relation, human relationships are unequal. Although everyone is a platform participant, “client orientation” is always the chief principle for platform development. Improving the clients’ experience and attitude about consumption has become a core factor for platforms to seize market share. The client is an important prerequisite for platforms to make profits: platform algorithm design and platform management are all built around the client, so meeting the needs of users has become the top priority for platforms. For this same reason, platforms demand that their workers provide impeccable “silky service” (丝滑服务).

When those who are often seen as “vulgar people” set foot in platform economies from sweatshop factories, construction sites and farmlands, what comes right away are an overwhelming number of detailed work requirements. For the first time in their lives, they have to learn how to manage their facial expressions and body language, how to communicate in proper Mandarin, how to “read the room,” and how to be soft to please customers. 

“(When I work for others) I never go to the bathroom. Nor do I drink any water. If I drink too much and go to the bathroom, my clients will be unhappy.” This is Mrs. Li’s secret to being a star cleaner, which is to endure. Sometimes she drinks nothing for eight hours straight, so that she can keep mopping the floor, doing the laundry, and cleaning the windows.

When technological systems favor one side over the other, an unequal relationship emerges. A systemic “disorder” becomes inevitable. The existence of “full-score service” and “on-call” has led to the “cultivation of laziness” (惰性养成) in the public. As a result, if a food delivery worker arrives a few minutes late, a client may get angry; if a package is delivered to the wrong place, the client may get irritated; if a cleaning lady forgets to clean a piece of furniture, she may receive a customer complaint.

Unreasonable “indulgence” has cultivated the customers’ laziness. In the long run, the effect may be negative. The cultivation and maintenance of social relations is a long-term process. If we lose our patience and trust, what comes after will be the other end of the systemic impasse—we may easily lose basic trust, amity, and tolerance among each other.

What lies behind these conflicts and discordances is a systemic problem of the model of platform economic development. The disorder of the rules of systems has led to frequent conflicts between individuals. We probably have heard this claim more than once: “The development of technology will clear up today’s worries in the end. Platform economies are no exception.” However, in the face of the big revolution Chinese platforms are going through today, I would rather be a conservative a little longer. Technological solutionism may sound quick, easy, and enticing. However, it is problematic to reduce complex social phenomena and ecosystems to simple, quantifiable processes. If we do so, we might only see the need to perfect the order of systems, but we will lose sight of the meaning of social relations.

The disorder of the system is a matter concerning data responsibility, social governance, labor dignity, and emotional ethics. It is a complex issue. When digital platforms come to today, there are too many problems to address. What is the most urgent for now might be a reflection of and improvement on the model of platform development.

Platformization: A Model in Question

The platform economy, to put it simply, is a new economic form supported by digital technologies, enabling multi-party transactions. It is made up of a series of data-driven, algorithm-based, and networked economic activities. Our lives are surrounded by platform economies: when we scroll on our cell phones, almost all the apps related to food, clothing, housing, and transportation can be considered “digital platforms.”

In their paper, legal scholar K. Sabeel Rahman and political scientist Kathleen Thelen suggest that an important feature of twenty-first-century platform capitalism is a paradigm shift of management from “control” to “connectivity.” Put differently, the business model of platform economies is no longer the old factory, Taylorist style of making money through controlling manpower, but a model that makes profits by connecting all parties. In this process, manpower comes and goes freely, but every person who enters the digital platform will be turned into data, and contribute to the profit of the platform. The existence and accumulation of platform big data lays the foundation for ”connectivity,” while the development of algorithms makes “connectivity” possible.

In my conversations with friends, one question that came up was why platform economies today could be so powerful, attractive, and destructive like the demon child Nezha.[2] The reason is simple: every platform extant today is a victor that survived multiple rounds of industry reshuffles, subsidy wars, price wars, and merger wars. These platforms carry a strong sense of crisis and a strong desire to survive. For them, survival is the top priority.

After all, digital platforms in China are going through serious “involution” (内卷), a process of incessant cut-throat competition that has not yielded proportional outputs for the participants. In the past decade, the cash-burning process of gathering funds, offering subsidies, seizing market share, and then raising the price has become the norm. In this survivalist process, consumers and workers have all become targets of platform competition.

Then, why are we so skeptical about today’s digital platforms?

In addition to the problems of commercialization and capitalization mentioned above, it is largely because platform development today has departed from its original vision. As a new form of production and labor model, the platform economy is characteristic of its ability to lead the new wave of technology. It is a “newborn” of the Internet industry, and a representative of technological innovation. To a large extent, it inherits our imaginations about Internet technologies: democratic participation, individual autonomy, equality, and progress.

In our mind, the platform economy should be similar to the Internet in its early days, full of openness and benevolent intentions—it is supposed to be an effective realm enabling peer-to-peer, permission-free innovation and open participation. In our imagination, everyone could join or quit a platform with no barriers, while sharing information, experiences, values, and ideas. It was supposed to be open and fair, with no suppression or mandates.

These ideals are beautiful, but the realities are chilling. 

Platform economies have forged ahead through the glory technology brings, huge investments, and a swarming labor force. With the logic of commercialization and privatization, they have plunged headlong into the ocean of capital without looking back. The principles of “equality” and “fairness” promised by the Internet have disappeared; individual, subaltern, and marginalized discourses are entangled with consumerist desires, being ignored, annihilated, and no longer present.

The last time I saw Ma Ting was in a small restaurant. In the summer of 2018, she told me shyly how she came from a small town and eventually settled in Beijing to do food delivery, because she thought she could make more money that way. A few months later, she had lost two electric motorcycles in three days and could not take it anymore. After she called the police, she squatted on a street corner, and cried. “I heard the GPS alert of my electric motorcycle (when it was gone), but I was delivering food on the twentieth floor.”

Such stories from the lower classes are often left unattended, but their discursive invisibility should be taken more seriously.

Our research team conducted a project on the Internet discursive power across different social classes in China over the past ten years. Our finding shows: From 2009 to 2019, there was significant stratification of discursive power among Chinese netizens on social media. 60% of the population account for only 1% of online expressions, whereas 6.3% of elites account for over 70% of online expressions. The lasting process of commercialization and capitalization has become a key approach for social elites to take over online discursive power, while decimating the discursive expressions of the lower class on the Internet.

As another challenge, artificial intelligence technologies today have not only replaced mass human labor, but also taken over much of humankind’s decision-making and discursive power. Technological abuse of power is becoming the norm in our society, not only in the settings of platform labor but also in daily life. For example, we ought to be more critical about why the autopilot system of Boeing aircraft is configured in a way that disallows human interventions.

Chinese society has rich textures of life, with vibrant forms of platforms growing there. If there is no effective way to amend the model and logic of platform development, the inverted pyramid structure of imbalanced development will expand to all aspects of social life. 

Is the Reconstruction of Meanings Possible?

The rise of platform economies is leading to another great shift in the Chinese labor market. In China’s Reform period [1990s-2000s], the phenomenal scenes of peasants migrating to factories are still in our recent memories. However, when it comes to today, “factories” are in the past, with the “gig economy” as the new future. The platform economy is producing a huge Siphon Effect, absorbing populations from traditional industries.

This is a colossal project of demographic “relocation.” According to “China’s Sharing Economy Development Report 2020,” the number of platform workers in China reached 78 million in 2019 and will hit 200 million within five years.

We are living in an era with a strong sense of “public commons.” Every day there are massive topics and problems coming to the surface of everyday life. However, in some public discussions we lack an attentiveness to “big questions.” The future direction and development model of platform economies is an example.. The specialization of technologies and labor division has divided platform systems into countless individualized, tiny “frames,” leading to hastily-fashioned responses to countless scenarios and problems when they come up. Time and space are compressed, meanings and relations are neglected, individual expressions are not validly heard, and the meaning of labor in the digital age is not effectively constructed by society. This is also where the loss of joy in labor is manifested.

In the past year, we have had big successive discussions about “work” and “labor.” A series of discussion topics has shown us the public’s engaged reflections on what decent work should look like. The rapid development of platform economies has rendered our theories and capacity for thinking outdated. We need more people to join in the reconstruction of the meaning of platform development, to think about some more sustainable forms of co-creating discourse and relationships, and to participate in the process of dialogue and reconstruction.

We need to establish a new form of digitized relationships, through which we need to consider the possibility of collaborative production, enhance the accessibility of technologies, and maintain long-term reciprocal relationships.

The platform economy is becoming a vehicle for the meanings of our lives. “Random encounters” are entering our lives as a form of normalized, everyday rule. This type of economy relies on a logic of “connectivity,” but under the current development of platforms, this form of “connectivity” excludes the establishment of meaningful relationships and the maintenance of decent labor. Consumers are prioritized, while workers are devalued. As a result, there are no trustworthy, sustainable, and respectable social relations created between the two ends of the platform.

We met a delivery worker in our fieldwork. Her name is Ma. Two years ago, her husband gambled online, and lost 1.5 million RMB. She went from being the owner of a hair salon to a delivery worker with nothing. Every day when she returned home, she would park her electric motorcycle one kilometer away from her neighborhood, take off her uniform, and then walk home. As she said, “I don’t want my neighbors to see and laugh at me.” One day, when Ma was waiting for an order on the street, she ran into a previous client of hers. She lowered her head, waiting to be ridiculed. The client spoke to her instead, “I didn’t expect that a boss like you would come to do delivery as well. In fact, I’m a rider, too, but I was embarrassed to let you know every time  I went to get my hair cut.”

There is a large number of low-barrier jobs in the current stage of platform labor. People in these jobs are struggling to identify themselves. In our fieldwork, we met many people like Ma, who were reluctant to reveal their jobs as couriers, delivery workers, or domestic workers. The model of platform development has reinforced the logic of treating digital labor as an underclass. How could the relationships established by algorithms and artificial intelligence move from “bias” to “justice”? This task will be an important precondition for the reconstruction of meanings and relationships.

The disorder of meanings is becoming the norm of our life. On one end of the disordered platform is the social system shared by all; on the other end are the micro-ecosystems of individual lives. The starting point for reconstructing meanings is to identify the ground of living together, on the basis of recognizing our mutual equality and equal right to share technological development.

Ping Sun is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Journalism and Communication, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Her research interests concern information and communications technology, social class, and platform media. Shiqi Lin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at University of California, Irvine.

 

Notes

[1] In China, food delivery workers and house cleaners are highly gendered professions:  90% of food delivery workers are male and 90% of house cleaners are female. This may have to do with Chinese societal expectations that see food delivery as masculinized labor and domestic services as feminized labor of care.This translation preserves the gendered language in the original text to highlight the gendered connotations of labor, yet it is crucial to interrogate this gendered framing and pay attention to the more marginalized workers who do not fit to these gender stereotypes.

[2] In Chinese legend, Nezha (哪吒) is a mischievous prodigy who was born to a military commander but perceived by his father as inauspicious. After killing the third son of the Dragon King, Nezha was pressured to take his own life to repay his debt and bring his town peace. Here, the author is referring  to the reincarnation of Nezha in a 2019 Chinese animated blockbuster, “Birth of the Demon Child Nezha.” The analogy between platform economies and Nezha points to the immense but disastrous social changes that could be created by platform economies.

 

Bibliography

Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. Beacon Press.

Rahman, K. S., & Thelen, K. (2019). The rise of the platform business model and the transformation of twenty-first-century capitalism. Politics & Society, 47(2), 177-204.

State Information Center Sharing Economy Research Center. (2020). China’s sharing economy development report 2020. Beijing. Retrieved from http://www.sic.gov.cn/News/568/10429.htm

Sun, P., Zhao, G., Liu, Z., Li, X., & Zhao, Y. (2020). Toward discourse involution within China’s Internet: Class, voice, and social media. New Media & Society, 1461444820966753.

ten Oever, N. (2021). “This is not how we imagined it”: Technological affordances, economic drivers, and the Internet architecture imaginary. New Media & Society, 23(2), 344-362.

Winner, L. (1978). Autonomous technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought. MIT Press.

Xiang, B. (2021, February 3). Biao Xiang on 996 and alienation: the new urban poor are not economically poor, but poor in meanings [项飙谈996和异化：城市新穷人不是经济穷人，是意义贫困]. Youthology [青年志]. Retrieved from https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/I-Fbl6AYCZOXFSMcdky5gg

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Sigrid Schmalzer, Beholding Yuan Longping in the Light of Recent Chinese History

The death last month of renowned Chinese rice geneticist Yuan Longping offered an opportunity for US media to say something positive about China and science: the story of the humble but brilliant Chinese scientist whose invention of hybrid rice saved countless peasants from starvation has been a refreshing break from news of the escalating US-China conflict. Still, the outpouring of grief and gratitude in Chinese social media may be hard for people in the US to fathom: Yuan Longping undoubtedly enjoyed more fame than any living scientist in the US, a mark not only of his accomplishments but also of the status of scientists, and science itself, in recent Chinese history. 

And yet, Yuan Longping’s death has also generated some undercurrents of doubt and criticism not entirely masked by state efforts to clamp down on negative portrayals. These rumblings recall something of the public response to the awarding, in 2015, of China’s first Nobel Prize in science to the pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou for her malaria research. In both cases, the reasons for the ambivalence lie in the complex politics of science in China today, which in turn owe a great deal to unresolved tensions about the meaning of the Mao era—when both Yuan Longping’s and Tu Youyou’s research came to fruition.

In its obituary of Yuan Longping, the New York Times hewed closely to the narrative established in Yuan’s own memoir: his parents were teachers who valued education; he studied genetics despite political pressures to embrace Lysenkoism; he was inspired to pursue rice breeding after witnessing people dying of famine; he “plowed on with his research even as the Cultural Revolution threw China into deadly political infighting”; and his achievements should be considered alongside those of US scientist Norman Borlaug as two parts of the so-called “Green Revolution.” In the US, this is a relatively familiar term for the set of technologies developed during the mid-twentieth century that dramatically increased crop yields. In China, it is a rarely used term and more likely to call to mind the “green” of environmentalism. In actuality, given the specific history of the term it is a highly ironic designation for research that arose in Mao-era China.

In 1967, USAID director William Gaud introduced the concept of Green Revolution as an alternative to “red revolution.” By sharing agricultural technologies that raised production and improved livelihoods, the US hoped to dissuade Third World countries from pursuing political, especially communist, revolution. This was a quintessentially technocratic approach that Mao and his followers explicitly rejected: rather, they insisted that technological transformation must not be divorced from social and political change. The technology for which Yuan Longping is famous emerged during the Cultural Revolution, the “reddest” period of Chinese history, out of a research program stamped with key characteristics of Maoist science.

Agricultural scientists had long recognized the phenomenon known as hybrid vigor: when two breeds of plants or animals are hybridized, the first generation of offspring is typically more robust than either their parents or subsequent generations. The trick was to create a technology that would produce first-generation hybrids on a large scale every year, which was particularly challenging with a self-pollinating plant like rice. In a backwater college in rural Hunan, Yuan Longping worked to overcome these obstacles with a team of peasants studying to become agricultural technicians. Once the technology had been developed, the elaborate infrastructure of Mao-era agricultural research and extension came into play: young peasants from rice-growing regions throughout China travelled to Hainan Island where they received intensive training, and then returned to their villages to teach others and begin local seed production. Mass participation, cultivation of rural youth talent, local self-reliance—all were hallmarks of Maoist red-revolutionary science.

And yet, if it is ironic to associate Yuan Longping with USAID’s technocratic vision of Green Revolution, it is also (ironically) fitting. Just five years after the hybrid rice field experiments began showing promise, Deng Xiaoping launched a dramatic transformation of China’s political economy. The red-revolutionary values in which hybrid rice had been embedded fell to the side, replaced by the production and marketing (including international marketing) through the China National Seed Corporation. Instead of valorizing Mao’s red revolution and facilitating local self-reliance, the success of hybrid rice came to validate a technocratic vision very similar to that of the Green Revolution, and arguably helped achieve the Green Revolution’s goal of making the developing world safe for capitalism.

Yuan Longping’s story thus straddles contradictory historical periods and raises uncomfortable questions about the meaning of the past and the legitimacy of the present. Since Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power, the Cultural Revolution has been portrayed as a ten-year catastrophe for science. Celebrating Yuan’s research within this narrative requires emphasizing the ways Yuan supposedly bucked Maoist pressures and achieved success in spite of the radical politics of the Cultural Revolution—hence the repetition of slim anecdotes testifying to Yuan’s resistance to Lysenkoism, the quintessential example in post-socialist memory of “leftist error.” Yuan, like all scientists, certainly faced his share of political struggles, but his research was nonetheless a product of red-revolutionary science. Some of those values continue to resonate to this day, and a large part of Yuan’s popular appeal owes a great deal to the way he embodies the Maoist ideal of the scientist who is simultaneously a peasant—who is humble and does not fear getting his hands and feet dirty. Indeed, as his biographies and obituaries frequently highlight, Yuan actively identified as an “intellectual peasant” (有知识的农民) or a “muddy-legs” (泥腿子), and is now remembered fondly by the Mao-era term of respect “old peasant” (老农).

But celebrating an individual scientist on the basis of this earthy ideal produces a paradox, because it runs counter to the values of humility and collectivism. Mao-era articles on hybrid rice avoided mentioning Yuan’s own contributions, instead highlighting those of the peasant-technician Li Bihu or, more often, emphasizing the broader “mass hybrid breeding scientific experiment movement.” It was during Hua Guofeng’s brief administration (1976-78) that Yuan Longping himself began to be recognized: Yuan’s achievements in Hunan shone a welcome light on Chairman Hua himself, who had directed agriculture in Hunan during those years. Even so, Hua-era reports on the research continued to emphasize the priorities of mass participation and local self-reliance. In the very different climate of the reform era, the glorification of individual elite scientists became the new norm, and Yuan increasingly became the unambiguous hero of the story. And yet, Chinese online discussions today continue to probe the question of whether Yuan himself should be credited with the invention of hybrid rice, or whether that honor belongs to his peasant-assistants or even to a larger, collective effort.

The current politics of food in China also produce a somewhat thorny context for the celebration of Yuan Longping. The state celebrates Yuan for his role in establishing China’s food security, which strengthens China’s position geopolitically. But an increasingly powerful consumer class worries more about food safety, and Yuan’s association with biotechnology companies that develop GMOs is a mark against him for some—while those favoring GMOs have objected to Yuan’s expressed doubts about some GMOs. Meanwhile, the food sovereignty movement has called attention to the ways in which hybrid rice and GM technologies prevent farmers from saving seeds for next year’s crops: farmers are required to purchase seeds every year from the seed companies, eroding peasant income while threatening China’s diverse agricultural genetic heritage. Netizens can still read the renowned rural reformer Li Changping’s impassioned 2011 letter to Yuan Longping, which has been recirculated after Yuan’s death by proponents of organic agriculture. In the letter, Li decried what he called “death-without-progeny” seeds, denounced the “geneticists and seed-industry capitalists” who had created them in pursuit of “monopolistic profits,” and begged Yuan to “climb down from the speeding chariot of commerce” and “give back the peasants’ right to freely select their seeds.” Mao-era anti-capitalist politics are thus still very much with us and will continue to haunt the memory of Yuan Longping.

Finally, the meaning attributed to Yuan Longping’s life in 2021 cannot be disentangled from China’s position on the global stage. As Foreign Minstry spokesperson Zhao Lijian proclaimed, “Yuan Longping belongs not just to China, but also to the world.” Throughout the ruptures of recent history, the PRC state has sought to play a prominent role in global science and technology, and also to use science and technology to further its global position: from the Mao-era days of international solidarity when Chinese agronomists promoted anti-colonial self-reliance in Africa, to the early Deng Xiaoping era when the Chinese National Seed Corporation struck a deal with the US company Occidental Petroleum (exchanging hybrid rice for hybrid cotton), to the current Belt and Road Initiative which supports the extension of agricultural technologies to countries around the world. In the end, whether Yuan Longping’s research will promote self-reliance or dependency, cooperation or capitalism, sustainability or ecological degradation, will depend less on the technologies themselves than on the political and economic structures that govern them.

 

Sigrid Schmalzer is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; she has written extensively on Yuan Longping in her 2016 book Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (U. of Chicago Press, 2016).

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