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ABSTRACT
This essay unravels the coalescence between bottom-up youth culture and state-led ideological work in China by examining the patriotic hip-hop music videos of a Chinese youth band. I attend to the ways in which the state-centric ideology is aesthetically evoked by co-opting popular cultural formats, maneuvering grassroots nationalistic expressions and appropriating symbols of both tradition and modernity. Hip-hop is thus localized and sanitized as a cultural medium of propaganda. The limitations of such co-optative tactics are also discussed, particularly the tradeoff between ideological control and authentic expressivity, and the risk of de-sublimating auratic cultural symbols for political persuasion.
Notes
* This manuscript is based on the author's conference presentation at ICA 2018. Although the title remains the same, it is a revised version. It has not been published elsewhere.
1 Weibo is a Chinese microblogging platform akin to Twitter.
2 Hannah Beech, “This Chinese Propaganda Rap Is the Most Painful Song Ever Recorded,” Time, June 30, 2016, http://time.com/4388991/china-rap-propaganda-cd-rev/.
3 CD is likely short for Chengdu, their hometown, and Rev probably stands for the word Revolution.
4 Johan Lagerkvist, “Internet Ideotainment in the PRC: National Responses to Cultural Globalization,” Journal of Contemporary China 17, no. 54 (2008): 121. doi:10.1080/10670560701693120.
5 Ibid.
6 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 2007); Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth Century China (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
7 Peter Gries, China's New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 119.
8 Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2003), 122; Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
9 Suisheng Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Some modernists think that nationalism emerged even later—since about 1800. See James Townsend, “Chinese Nationalism,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 27 (1992): 105. doi:10.2307/2950028.
10 Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction, 12.
11 Suisheng Zhao, “Foreign Policy Implications of Chinese Nationalism Revisited: The Strident Turn,” Journal of Contemporary China 22, no. 82 (2013): 535–53. doi:10.1080/10670564.2013.766379.
12 Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction, 227.
13 Xu Wu, Chinese Cyber Nationalism: Evolution, Characteristics and Implications (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007).
14 Ibid.
15 Lijun Yang and Yongnian Zheng, “Fen Qings (Angry Youth) in Contemporary China,” Journal of Contemporary China 21, no. 76 (2012): 637–53. doi:10.1080/10670564.2012.666834.
16 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, 92.
17 Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction, 2.
18 Ibid., 20.
19 Zhao, “Foreign Policy Implications of Chinese Nationalism Revisited,” 540.
20 Ibid., 536.
21 Wang Hui, “Depoliticized Politics, Multiple Components of Hegemony, and the Eclipse of the Sixties,” trans. Christopher Connery, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, no. 4 (2006): 683–700. doi:10.1080/14649370600983303.
22 Daniel Lynch, After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and “Thought Work” in Reformed China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Ashley Esarey, “Cornering the Market: State Strategies for Controlling China's Commercial Media,” Asian Perspective 29, no. 4 (2005): 37–83, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42704523; Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Lantham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
23 Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012); Marja Kaikkonen, Laughable Propaganda: Modern Xiangsheng as Didactic Entertainment (Stockholm: Institute of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University, 1990); Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
24 David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991); Zhihong Gao, “When Nationalism Goes to the Market: The Case of Chinese Patriotic Songs,” Journal of Macromarketing 35, no. 4 (2015): 473–88. Doi:10.1177/0276146715573079.
25 Nimrod Baranovitch, China's New Voice: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978–1997 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).
26 Gao, “When Nationalism Goes to the Market,” 484.
27 Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 21.
28 Katina R. Stapleton, “From the Margins to Mainstream: the Political Power of Hip-hop,” Media, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (1998): 220. doi:10.1177/016344398020002004.
29 Ibid., 222.
30 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic as Counterculture to Modernity (London: Verso, 1993), 16.
31 George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (London: Verso, 1994), 36.
32 Ibid., 37.
33 Tony Mitchell, “Doin’ Damage in my Native Language: The Use of ‘Resistance Vernaculars’ in Hip Hop in France, Italy, and Aotearoa/New Zealand,” Popular Music & Society 24, no. 3 (2000): 41–54. doi:10.1080/03007760008591775.
34 Ibid., 51.
35 Andy Bennett, “Hip-hop am Main: The Localization of Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture,” Media, Culture & Society 21, no. 1 (1999): 77–91. doi:10.1177/016344399021001004.
36 Mitchell, “Doin’ Damage in my Native Language,” 52.
37 Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 11; cited in Gao, “When Nationalism Goes to the Market,” 484.
38 Mitchell, “Doin’ Damage in my Native Language.”
39 Nathanel Amar, “Do You Have Freestyle?: The Roots of Censorship in Chinese Hip-hop,” China Perspectives, no. 1–2 (2018): 107–13. http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/7888.
40 Rose, Black Noise, 101.
41 Elham Golpushnezhad, “Untold Stories of DIY/Underground Iranian Rap Culture: The Legitimization of Iranian Hip-Hop and the Loss of Radical Potential,” Cultural Sociology 12, no. 2 (2008): 260–75. doi:10.1177/1749975518769001.
42 Amar, “Do You Have Freestyle?”
43 Margaret E. Roberts, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018), 26.
44 Zhiling Fan, “Zhuanfang ‘Tianfu Shibian’ Yuedui Jiulinghou Zhuchuang: ‘Aiguo Shuochang,’ Suzao Zhenshi Zhongguo (Interview with post-90s band ‘CD Rev’: ‘patriotic rap’ portraying a real China).” Huanqiuwang (Global Times Online), September 2, 2016, http://china.huanqiu.com/article/2016-09/9390922.html?agt=15438.
45 “Meet China's patriotic rap group CD Rev,” BBC News, August 2, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-36924071/meet-china-s-patriotic-rap-group-cd-rev.
46 Javier C. Hernández. “Propaganda With a Millennial Twist Pops Up in China,” The New York Times, December 31, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/world/asia/china-propaganda-communist-party-millennials.html
47 Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (London: Verso Books, 2014).
48 Ibid., 190.
49 Ibid., 190, 264.
50 Ibid., 188.
51 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 19.
52 Tony Mitchell, Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 36.
53 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 20.
54 Antonio Gramsci, Selection from Prison Notebooks, trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).
55 Ibid.
56 Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives: China's Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966, ed. Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 38.
57 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). Anderson argues that the imagination of the nation could not be possible without a fundamentally new perception of time—the linear, homogeneous, and calendric time. In this modality of time, the past, present and future progress along a horizontal line.
58 Cai, Revolution and Its Narratives, 142.
59 Anthony D. Smith, “Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations,” Nations and Nationalism 1, no. 1 (1994): 3–23. doi:10.1111/j.1354-5078.1995.00003.x.
60 Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters For Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013), 209.
61 Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction, 70.
62 Oliver Zimmer, “Boundary Mechanisms and Symbolic Resources: Towards a Process-Oriented Approach to National Identity,” Nations and Nationalism 9, no. 2 (2003): 173–93. doi:10.1111/1469-8219.00081
63 Kojin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. Brett de Bary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
64 Cai, Revolution and Its Narratives, 37.
65 Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), 11.
66 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40.
67 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984).
68 Ibid., 286–287, 295, 305–308.
69 Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, ed. Stuart Hall, Doothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson, 1980).
70 Amar, “Do You Have Freestyle,” 110.
71 Benjamin, Illuminations, 243.
72 Ibid., 223.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., 229.
75 See Benjamin, Illuminations, 233. When discussing a cameraman in comparison with a painter, Benjamin draws an analogy of a surgeon vis-à-vis a magician: the magician maintains a distance from the patient to be treated, whereas a surgeon penetrates into the patient's body. In a similar vein, while the painter maintains his or her distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates into its web.
76 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York: Verso, 1977), 176.
77 Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 71.
78 Ibid., 77–78.
79 Liu Fengshu, “‘Politically Indifferent’ Nationalists? Chinese Youth Negotiating Political Identity In the Internet Age,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2012): 53–69. doi:10.1177/1367549411424950.
80 Wang, The Sublime Figure of History.
81 Benjamin, Illuminations.
82 Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 7.
83 Ibid., 15.