You Had to Have Been There: Laughing at Lunch about the Chinese Dream
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/689670
ISSN1539-7858
Autores Tópico(s)Japanese History and Culture
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeYou Had to Have Been There: Laughing at Lunch about the Chinese DreamJudith FarquharJudith FarquharPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhen I arrived in Beijing in July 2014, a friend who works at a university there told me that, a few days before, a high official in the Communist Party (CCP) headquarters had denounced the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), apparently for being too leftist. My friend said, "We all think this is some kind of black humor on their part." This invocation of black humor—the phrase was in English—instantly made sense to me. Understanding both why the Communist Party needed to be taken quite seriously and why its funniness was also patent, we laughed. But why? How did a dark threat issuing from party headquarters translate into a shared laugh for academics belonging to two different continents and relying at times on a "foreign" language?Much of this essay will be devoted to this kind of question about the translatability of humor, and it will suggest that much more than a punchline is funny.1 Though my friend's remark about party central's attitude toward the left deviations of some social researchers was not exactly a joke, it was certainly a form of levity. The pleasure we felt in our shared ability to appreciate the tortuous (il)logic of an official pronouncement was made possible by a complex shared knowledge of modern Chinese history and institutions and considerable experience of the everyday life of Chinese mass media. It was not only a fieldwork moment for an ethnographer; it was also an expression of a certain moment in Beijing, one that is now past or passing. To get the joke, you had to have been there, and you had to have been then.Anthropologists often remark that jokes are especially untranslatable; some have told me that they seldom really really laugh in the field, experiencing a return to Chicago or New York or their family culture or English language television as a "return to laughter."2 It is as if we never can educate our gut—the place belly laughs come from—to live comfortably either with other people's sober proprieties or with their violations of them. When obligatory and thickly nested local frames are both invoked and exploded in a joke, much of the point is lost on those of us who are not entirely there and then.3 As visitors, we are usually relative newcomers to the world thus framed and thus transgressed, so we don't even see what proprieties and commitments might be at stake. Shouldn't criticism of a research institute issuing from party headquarters in Zhongnanhai be taken seriously? Presumably this news is bad, or black, because the party configures and supports the institutional structures allowing some people to live as intellectuals. If this CCP policy maker is serious, lives and jobs might be at stake. Why is it also possible to see this denunciation as comical? Presumably because some representative of the party has failed to notice that the intellectuals reporting to him have been doing exactly as directed, keeping the Chinese communist dream alive, helping him and his government do their job in a one-party state where all academic institutions are publicly governed. As the audience of this (by now not very funny) joke, I find myself simultaneously worrying about the dark implications of a high cadre's outburst and laughing at the way the weapon has been turned on its user, showing up the fault lines in the party apparatus in a not quite typical example of socialist black humor.4We anthropologists—at our best—are thoroughly relativist in our efforts to appreciate distance and difference; we pride ourselves on being experts at cultural displacement and even transgression.5 Even so, the classic work in anthropology tends to have no sense of humor. When we translate joking behavior from our field sites the humor tends to be read through to find those enframing structures or invariant principles that might be challenged or reinforced (or both at once) by a play on words, a ludic pratfall, or a paradoxical contretemps. Jokes tend to be thought of as a light-hearted text that indexes a very serious context,6 and when they are analyzed to reveal their architecture and foundations, anthropologists and their readers are in danger of becoming numb to all possible pleasure in the moment itself.A. R. Radcliffe-Brown published the classic treatment of joking relationships as two essays in his Structure and Function in Primitive Society. His treatment of a disrespectful or teasing practice, which he found distributed around the world in correlation with certain forms of lineage politics, was markedly scientific and sober. In the two essays, there is one joke described and that only in part:There is space for only one illustrative point. A very common form of joke in this connection is for the grandchild to pretend that he wishes to marry the grandfather's wife, or that he intends to do so when his grandfather dies, or to treat her as already being his wife. Alternatively the grandfather may pretend that the wife of his grandchild is, or might be, his wife. The point of the joke is the pretense at ignoring the difference of age between the grandparent and the grandchild.7In reporting this instance of humorous behavior, Radcliffe-Brown was not trying to suggest that bawdy grandmas and disrespectful youngsters are a universal formation in society. His comparative science worked at another level: once we understand why standards of propriety are relaxed between individuals occupying particular positions in a rigid kinship structure, he argued, we can look for similar transgressions in those other societies that share the same kinship structures. In other words, humor functions as "the means of establishing and maintaining social equilibrium in a type of structural situation that results in many societies from marriage."8 Analysis of "joking behavior" in the hands of the anthropologist reveals little more than the dead-serious structural imperatives that constrain and give meaning to social action. Of course there are many problems with Radcliffe-Brown's structural-functionalist privileging of stability, "equilibrium," and systems.9 But though he seldom felt it worth his while to actually present a joke in translation, he does appear to have considered jokes to be translatable once they were understood in context. He presumed that actions that at first appear odd—describing a new policy statement as black humor, for example—should be legible as quite rational and normal, once we understand (soberly, of course) the whole "structural" situation.10In this essay I will continue some parts of this anthropological tradition by presenting some exchanges that had me laughing—really really laughing—with others, in the field.11 On one hand, I follow Radcliffe-Brown's example in showing that locations in space and time, gatherings of place and history, and conventional formalities and proprieties are the irreducible field of the funny. Insofar as joking transgresses the normal givenness of its world, it is thoroughly situated; it behooves us to understand both Rabelais and his world.12 But, on the other hand, I also want to dwell on the joke itself before reading through it to the social field in which it plays and from which its humor may or may not be translatable. I will thus touch only lightly on the contemporary Chinese political terrain across which joking walks and talks. The etymologies of translate and transgress suggest wordplay and fancy footwork, and I want to appreciate these leaps and bounds. At the same time, I will show that joking is done by fully embodied people whose lives are specific to histories and localities and thus difficult to understand in isolation.So let's reconsider the black humor of a Communist Party functionary. What could be humorous about the central governing structure of the Communist Party turning against China's most elite social researchers? Statements like this from CCP headquarters at the time were greeted in the US academy with a very bleak outlook. American China studies specialists expressed fear that we would all be denied visas and our Chinese colleagues would be silenced on every matter of social and political concern. (These fears continue and are intensifying as I write in late 2015, as new anticorruption policies and information disciplines begin to have an impact.) Many of us expected our Chinese academic friends to be sunk in despair. Instead, we have found them sharing hilariously plausible conspiracy theories over convivial meals and speculating about who is the funniest comedian among senior cadres in CCP headquarters, as well as whether anyone in the party compound of Zhongnanhai actually gets the joke.I think you had to have been there, up to your neck in Chinese academic politics for a long time, to see the black humor in the situation. You would have to have known in your own practice that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is the party's kept think tank. You had to be accustomed to CASS's looming presence in the knowledge industry—huge and long-standing and heavily funded by the government. You would have been aware of a large number of prominent intellectuals—philosophers, historians, sociologists, Marxist theorists, social theorists, area studies experts, humanists—whose careers were entirely attached to CASS. You would have known that the leadership in CCP headquarters had often involved CASS intellectuals in the policy process through formal consultation and collection of their research results. And complaints about CASS's internal research funding competitions, in which the aim is to design and propose valid research that answers the questions posed by the state, would be fresh in your mind.The critic who attacked CASS in June 2014 argued, apparently, that too many researchers at CASS are being "corrupted" by their involvement with transnational NGOs and other "civil society" organizations. There was also the suggestion that CASS theorists are too allied with the Chinese New Left, which is well known for its critical stance that favors some old Maoist and socialist values and opposes many of the newer business-friendly neoliberal policies that encourage privatization and market freedoms. My particular friends who were "laughing at [the CCP] Leviathan"13 also knew that a large part of the CASS charge during the last two years or so has been to research "the Chinese dream."14The Chinese dream has been ubiquitous in the PRC mediascape since about 2013; one sees "public service" posters everywhere featuring drawings of fat happy children, assuring us that the Chinese dream is "my dream," or "the people's dream." A very interesting Wikipedia article notes that "according to the party's theoretical journal Qiushi, the Chinese Dream is about Chinese prosperity, collective effort, socialism and national glory" (among other things, but see the joking conversation reported below). These ideological labels are rather vast and vague, and turning such propaganda categories into socially useful alliances of actors takes creative social research. This is part of CASS's job, but the task has frustrated many in Chinese research units over the last couple of years.15If you had been there, then, the ridiculousness of this CCP leader's criticism might have been quite clear. His was a paradoxical critique: the Communist Party suddenly found its kept intellectuals, its policy mouthpieces, to be too darn socialist. And this was a charge by communists against communists, disvaluing the earnest labor of perhaps the only group of intellectuals in the twenty-first century who were still trying to make a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist social theory a plausible guide for the people of a modern nation. The unsettling message of the joke is: "All critics of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'—otherwise known as neoliberal laissez-faire market piracy—Beware!" Some Communist Party leader might tar you with the brush of "civil society," revoke your research funding, and make it nearly impossible for you to make the Chinese dream your own. Especially if some people fail to realize that he must have been joking.But what about the Chinese dream; is it a joke all by itself? This was the subject of the jolly conversation to which I want to devote the remainder of this discussion, partly reporting what was said and partly sketching the explicit and implicit elephants in the room as we talked. (An elephant in the room is a pretty good joke in itself, with its juxtaposition of large and small, wild and domestic, lovable and terrifying, and undeniably visible yet totally ignored.)Later in July 2014: My collaborator Lili Lai and I are in Kunming, Yunnan, which is rather far from Beijing and the CCP headquarters at Zhongnanhai, at a university where I gave a talk. We went to a department-sponsored lunch, in a restaurant's private room, with five college teachers. I asked them, what is this Chinese dream I see all over the billboards and on TV? What is included in it?The charming senior professor at the table, Professor He, said "I haven't got a clue, I'm no Communist. Ask a Communist! Teacher Li here is a party member, ask her."Teacher Li admitted, however, that she also wasn't sure, but she hazarded a guess: "Freedom? Justice? Equality?" Teacher Chen, another colleague, followed up with a reference to last year's big propaganda category: "Surely it also includes a 'Harmonious Society'!"This remark broke everyone up, especially Teacher Chen himself, whose face split into a huge grin with a giant belly laugh. In a place like Yunnan, more multiethnic, rural, and subject to borderland conflicts than many Chinese provinces, these intellectuals were understandably sardonic about the party's multiyear (and now not very evident) harmonious society campaign. By 2014, none of us were seeing public slogans about social harmony any more. Moreover, the harmonious society had not, we guessed, been subsumed within the newly ubiquitous Chinese dream. Propaganda history doesn't seem to work that way. So Teacher Chen's joke, in a few words, dredged up a bit of arguably "tragic" history—the harmonious society had never really been achieved, after all—to suggest that the Chinese dream was bringing it back as farce. The logic of the Eighteenth Brumaire is never far from contemporary Chinese senses of history—or senses of humor.As we continued to talk about the "meaning" of the Chinese dream, everyone realized that they had no idea what this ubiquitous term the Chinese dream was supposed to include. Not only was the referent lost, nobody present had—up to this point—cared at all what it was. And this was the cause of a lot more laughter. Unforced, uncynical, trusting laughter, unafraid of seeming childish. Our amusement (or in this case I should perhaps say their amusement) stemmed from a shared awareness that we were not properly receptive subjects of the propaganda state. After all, it is the party-state that talks of the Chinese dream, so it seemed like we ought to care. And know what all the fuss was about.I said, it sounds like there's nothing especially Chinese about this Chinese dream. Is it different from the American dream? So our group went to work trying to define the American dream. Teacher Bai—who has studied in Australia—began working on the Horatio Alger angle of individuals working their way up to wealth and power through sheer grit and hard work, but I told her I thought it was simpler than that; maybe the American dream is just that every individual can get rich somehow. With this remark, I was invoking a much older Chinese state policy, the early reform period's state economists' view that a few can get rich first (so everyone else will eventually get rich, too, or at least comfortable).16 The convergence of an American dream with the Chinese dream, we could agree, would take place on a neoliberal capitalist terrain that shares at least the logic of trickle-down economics.Our companions more or less agreed to the similarities, but we had not solved the problem of what the specific state-crafted content of the Chinese dream might be. Everyone thought it was hilarious that they couldn't be sure of it themselves, but they also tried out various versions of propaganda language with sheer enjoyment and a great sense of citational fun. My companions at that lunch are specialists in words, after all, and they found it funny that there's a whole class of language that hasn't been engaging them, even though it is everywhere.Teacher Zhu got out her smart phone and started googling the Chinese dream.17 Every once in a while someone would ask her if she'd found a definition, and she would say with an embarrassed laugh, "lots of hits, no information." Every site has pages of prose, she said, but none of it says anything!Finally Teacher Li—the party member—proposed calling her ninth-grade daughter and asking her. Surely this middle school student would have studied the Chinese dream in depth. Sure enough, she knew the answer right off. The Chinese dream, she said, "is an expansion of the core values of socialism: revitalized national spirit, national wealth and strength, well-being among the people, social harmony." The daughter was a little horrified that we—her mother's professional friends—had to ask. For this schoolchild, this kind of knowledge is the iron rations of official truth. Professor He said later, she must have thought we were playing a trick on her or giving her a pop quiz—a whole group of adults seeking official information from a kid? How ridiculous is that?18The situation was ridiculous. Or it actually was "a trick" we were playing on Teacher Li's very sober and already well-educated daughter. Even though, as our virtual informant, she seemed awfully serious on the subject of the Chinese dream, Professor He guessed that she suspected a joke was being played on her. We could all understand the "I am not amused" tone of the person who thought she might be the butt of a joke. The real targets of all this wordplay were the adults; but Teacher Li's ninth-grade daughter would have had to have been there to see that.As everyone knew, as a party member Teacher Li had sat through lots of political trainings since the Chinese dream was rolled out by the Propaganda Ministry in 2013. These training sessions are intended to help everyone in a leadership position get the language of policy correct, understand its implications, and think through ways to exemplify and implement the Party's latest imaginary, in this case, the Chinese dream.19 Such trainings are one of the practices that build institutions of government and give them weight. But they are also classroom settings where everyone is a little fractious, bored, and sometimes looking out the window. "Political-study" trainings are also, even in China, opportunities for the class clown to act up and lighten the mood and for those in authority to look the other way. It's not as if Teacher Li had blown off these trainings. She probably took notes, adopted some new vocabulary herself, and even at times thought about the implications of positively charged principles like freedom, justice, equality for her work at a university in Kunming, in 2014.The condition that was being laid bare by our joking conversation, however, was a familiar one, perhaps especially because we are all academics trafficking constantly in idealistic abstractions like these. Much of our work involves excavating the concrete social activities that advance (or not) the achievement of freedom, justice, equality even as we realize that everyday life everywhere undermines and problematizes such ideals. Though we don't theorize it much (at least in anthropology, our shared field at that lunch), the work of forging a relationship between concrete life and abstract principles, between things and words, is what we routinely and soberly do. This signifying labor of referring to a world is what we as social scientists are all about.20 So this occasion of casual talk, good food spread out before us, comfortable laughter at the ready, was an opportunity to notice how little we, or anybody, really care about the politically correct abstractions in which we routinely trade.21 We prefer the stories and jokes that encapsulate without denouncing all the contradictions of modern struggle over words and the real.Previously I have attempted a historically situated and appreciative reading of Chinese state propaganda dating from the Maoist period.22 This effort departed from the rather suspicious readings of some experts on the Chinese media of the Maoist and reform periods.23 I argued that propaganda images, like the cartoon children now embodying the Chinese dream, are a form of realism even though they do not engage in a literal-minded discourse of truth. Everyone knows that the rosy-cheeked female welders and model soldiers one saw in the classic posters, and especially their happy smiles, were implausible in the flawed present of Chinese lives and labors. But these happy socialist workers were not pretending to be a news photo; they were not meant to convey factual information. Rather they were drawn (in a more naturalistic style than the poster children of the contemporary Chinese dream) to articulate with the people's realistic aspirations toward a near future. The plausibility of a socialist propaganda image is its postulating of an ideal situation that can be read as being within the reach of its audience's real lives.24 With a little more effort and collective good will, viewers should think—as they note all the familiar details that add up to a comfortable everyday life—"we can be like that, too." I don't know whether the pudgy folk-art children claiming ownership of the Chinese dream on today's urban signboards speak to the aspirations—for wealth? for plenty of food? for grandchildren?—of my lunch companions. But it was fairly clear that no one saw the campaign as mere cynical state posturing. A dream postulates possible worlds. I doubt if, under contemporary conditions, my Kunming colleagues would object to the futures being dreamed for them by the state Propaganda Ministry.25This is not to suggest that academics in China are coopted by the state. To make their relative distance from the seats (or hilarious collapsing chairs?) of power a little clearer, I want to report another joke that came up at that same meal. Academics all, and under pressure not to spend too much of the university's money on hosting foreign guests, our Kunming friends didn't insist on the old-fashioned ritual proprieties of constant toasting with distilled liquor. A few polite gestures had to be made, however, so at one point Lili chose to represent me in posing a toast to our colleagues at the table. I followed with a toast of my own, saying—awkwardly, perhaps—that I wished them good health "on my own behalf" (benshen). Professor He corrected me; I should have said I was toasting them "my own self" (qinzi). He told a joke—a very widely repeated joke, he said, in this provincial university—about a Yunnan Province governor, a member of a well-known and locally powerful minority nationality, who while attending a meeting in Beijing actually encountered Premier Deng Xiaoping in the men's room. The provincial official got all flustered, not sure what one says to the nation's paramount leader in the men's room. He blurted out, "Comrade Deng, you actually go to the toilet qinzi, your own self?"Professor He then analyzed this joke.26 He said everyone finds this funny because the protagonist is a provincial and a minority; it partly lampoons the presumed muddle-headedness of even the most important leaders in this province so far from Beijing, the seat of sovereign rationality (and home of much dark comedy). And of course it expresses a predictable resentment on the part of academics, who sometimes feel they are being governed by relatively clueless officials, administrators who are provincial in several senses of the word. But it also ridicules a regrettable tendency to see the national leadership as somehow made of paper and words rather than flesh and blood, sweat and piss. In some ways, then, this joke about Deng Xiaoping in the toilet was the same one that had been running throughout our conversation: flesh-and-blood academics in Yunnan confess cheerfully to each other that they have no grasp of the meaning of state communications on paper. The real referent of all the signs has gone missing, not only for intellectuals but even for out-of-touch government officials. Only school children can keep the signifier and the concept provisionally attached to each other. Perhaps the realization that the tiger of state power really is made of paper has not even escaped middle school students, however serious they are required to be about official semantics. At least until they have passed the terrifying college entrance exam.Being ThereAre good, satisfying, really funny jokes untranslatable? Are there worlds so different that transgressions in one appear only as conventions in the other? Are there displacements within some worlds that wittily challenge an established order at its roots but that appear only as lack, failure, or muddle in another world? Is state propaganda a joke everywhere, or are there audiences, witnesses, or publics that appreciate its ironies beyond the rustling roar of paper tigers? The lunchtime joking I have discussed in this essay begins to address such questions, exploring some ways in which a whole situation in contemporary China is translated into a specific conviviality. After all, those of us gathered at lunch were all academics, Chinese speakers, urbanites, world travelers, and—most important—habitual translators of contemporary worlds. At that moment, none of us felt especially vulnerable to the disciplinary black humor criticizing New Left sociologists, issuing from party headquarters at Zhongnanhai. The fun we had as we tried to define the Chinese dream can be contextualized in the highly mediated lived world that we had in common, and some of the background we invoked—even when it was ancient history, like the "some can get rich first" policy of the 1980s—could be taken for granted among us. We shared a great deal, so some things did not need to be translated.Nevertheless, there was an excess in this situation, a surplus of pleasure in sharing our freedom to laugh at Leviathan and to make light of official terminologies and abstractions. Most of the time, the core values of socialism and the Chinese dream are just part of the air we breathe while we pursue our life and work in Chinese cities.27 But the disruption achieved by joking conversation reasserts a distance between worlds, even when these worlds are tightly intertwined. That is to say, it was only because we could laugh at the central state propaganda machine that we knew we were able to exist at a remove from it. For awhile, the state could be the other to our (quite diversely positioned) selves.Were we laughing for different reasons or in full solidarity as we worked together to define the Chinese dream? Was this a case of same bed, different dreams? Does any maker of jokes really know if those present are laughing with him or at her? There may have been some cross-currents of ridicule at that lunch in Kunming. But given that we all knew from professional travel and struggles with multilingualism, in painful embodied practice, that jokes are not supposed to translate well, surely it counts that we all found a way to really really laugh together about research policy, state propaganda, and the provincialism of those above us.In a way, though, it must be admitted that we were not really laughing about such things. Rather, we were laughing within them. This lunch gathering was more than a collection of critical intellects engaging in paradoxical or transgressive thinking; we were not sharing ideas or facts. If our "jokes" had been about politics, the stubborn failures of translation that secretly afflict all communication would have been more noticeable. Everyone there, for example, could claim much more knowledge about academic life in a Chinese provincial capital than I have ever possessed, so there were certainly things I didn't understand. And there may have been tensions among these colleagues simmering beneath the respectful and convivial surfaces of our conversation that even Lili, as a Beijinger, could not perceive but that may have inflected everyone else's remarks. There is much that we did not have in common; yet our enjoyment of the situation—both copresent and recently past, both memorious and aspirational—was genuinely shared. The fact that we laughed so much, with so much enjoyment, is the proof that we were all there and all then, translating the big joke of state power for each other, from within it.ConclusionDo the comedians in the Chinese Communist Party propaganda apparatus get the joke? Do they see the ludicrousness of the situation in which self-evident core values are proposed as a shared dream for everyone? The general impression is that they do not. Perhaps they are not in a structural position to share the laughter of the people. Classically in China, the sovereign is not allowed to joke.28 Where the lord's word is law, it would not do for him do to engage in wordplay or paradoxical foolishness. The fact that modern leaders of fractious republics famously do so—Mao's witticisms are different from but not less clever than those of John Kennedy or Barack Obama—must be an index of the modernity of power in nation-states. Jokes bubble up at all levels in the everyday life of state power in China, as they do in other modern nation
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