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Abstract
The transition from socialist to post-socialist China goes hand-in-hand with a devaluation of human labor. In China today, human labor has been alienated, reified, and stripped of embodied practices, affective value, ecological awareness, and cultural memory. But countervailing trends arise and challenge alienated labor. In this essay, I explore how quotidian handiwork, commonly considered low-value and inefficient, is represented as new forms of sentimental qualities, artisanal intelligence, and ecological wisdom by examining the first season of the recent popular 2012 documentary series A Bite of China (Shejianshang de Zhongguo). I investigate how this documentary depicts craftsmanship in food-making as new structures of human-human, human-object, and human-nature relations in the domain of work. In an attempt to critique and redeem labor, dehumanized by technology and industrialization, the documentary’s valorization of craftsmanship problematizes our separation between the socialist and post-socialist vision of labor. A reflection upon industrial production and the handicraft tradition invokes the socialist aesthetics of non-alienated labor and indicates an effort to envision a more idealistic Chinese labor condition.
Notes
1 “Shanghai Husi Company Food Safety Scandal.”
2 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 72.
3 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 108.
4 Ibid.
5 The average audience ratings reached 0.5 percent and exceeded all the other TV series played at the same time. See “The Story behind the Creation of A Bite of China.”
6 “A Bite of China: From ‘the Tip of the Tongue’ Kept Apart.”
7 Guo, “Chinese Tastes.” 第一财经日报
8 Ren, “An Interview of the Executive Director of A Bite of China.”
9 For discussion on nationalism and food documentary, see Fan Yang, “A Bite of China: Food, Media, and the Televisual Negotiation of National Difference,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 32, no. 5 (July 2015): 409–25; Chien-Fu Huang, “Cuisine, People, and Nation: The Imagination of Community in A Bite of China” (“Meishi, minzhong yu minzu: Shejianshang de zhongguo de gongtongti xiangxiang” 美食、民众与民族:《舌尖上的中国》的共同体想像), Journal of Chinese Dietary Culture 11, no.1 (April 2015): 123–49; Kunze Rui, “Tasting a Good Life : Narratives and Counter-Narratives of Happiness in the Documentary A Bite of China 2 (2014),” China Perspectives 113, no.1–2 (January 2018): 45–54.
10 Mao, “The Representations of Nature and Culture in A Bite of China,” 62–83.
11 Institutionally, A Bite of China was produced under the “producer responsibility system” launched in 1993, which “allows producers to recruit their own crew, outsource projects to freelance filmmakers and manage their own budget.” See Chu, Chinese Documentaries, 95.
12 “Being Changed by A Bite of China.”
13 Douban is one of the most famous community sites based on organic content generated by users, a large proportion of which are reviews of books and movies. For discussion of A Bite of China on Douban, see https://movie.douban.com/subject/10606004/reviews.
14 Day, Peasant in Postsocialist China, 16.
15 Chen, “An Interview with the Director Chen Xiaoqing of A Bite of China.”
16 Yan, “Food Safety and Social Risk in Contemporary China,” 713.
17 Hardt, “Affective Labor,” 96.
18 Ibid.,” 100.
19 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 73–74.
20 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 92–93.
21 See https://www.amazon.com/A-Bite-of-China/dp/B00NB8TL1W for further reference.
22 Sennett, The Craftsman, 119–20.
23 Chen and Ren, “Chief Director Chen Xiaoqing, Chief Executive Director Ren Changzhen Talking about A Bite of China.”“
24 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, with the collaboration of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Schelem (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1872), quoted in Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 276.
25 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 76.
26 Ibid.
27 Arendt, The Human Condition, 126.
28 See a report published by the Chinese Academy of Engineering for reference, which points out that to a large extent, food safety problems stem from environmental issues such as pollution: https://www.yicai.com/news/100742943.html.
29 “The Story behind the Creation of A Bite of China.”
30 Ibid.
32 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 163–64.
33 My translation.
34 Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 134–36. Also see Sennett, The Craftsman, 51–52.
35 Tucker, “Relevance of Chinese Neo-Confucianism,” 55–69.
36 Sennett, The Craftsman, 9.
37 Ibid.
38 Chen and Ren, “Chief Director Chen Xiaoqing, Chief Executive Director Ren Changzhen Talking about A Bite of China.”
39 Zhang, Going to the Countryside, 149.
40 Ibid., 175.
41 Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature, 3.
42 Anne Murcott, “Food as an Expression of Identity,” 69.
43 Chen, “An Interview of the Chief Director of A Bite of China.”
44 Nichols, Representing Reality, 12.
45 Ren, “An Interview of the Executive Director of A Bite of China.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lingjia Xu
Lingjia Xu is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese literature, film, and media studies at Stanford University. She also holds a PhD minor in art and art history. Before starting her PhD, Lingjia obtained her BA in Chinese Language from Fudan University and her MA in Chinese from Stanford. She is currently working on craftsmanship and labor in East Asia. Her broad interests include critical theory, phenomenology, new media studies, design history, and STS (science, technology, and society).