Beijing Time

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2011 28: 321Theory Culture SocietyStephanie Hemelryk Donald

Temporal Shift in China's Capital and Magnificent Chaoyang : Sociality, Markets andBlack SnowBeijing Time,

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Beijing Time, Black Snow andMagnificent ChaoyangSociality, Markets and Temporal Shift inChina’s Capital

Stephanie Hemelryk DonaldBeijing Time

by Michael Dutton, with Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo and Dong Dong Wu

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, 265 pp., ISBN978-0-674-02789-3

Abstract

Modern social order is premised on a shared conception of and obedience

to a set of defined temporal systems. Time is therefore a powerful

tool with which to layer, classify and police the nature of social order. This

article explores the relationship between temporality and the social

in China’s capital, Beijing. The article draws on observations of Chinese film

of the 1990s, the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2011,

and the Chaoyang district beautification campaign, to identify how tempo-

ral structures and symbols are traded and manipulated in the pursuit of

political rectification and harmony. The article is based on an extended

review of Michael Dutton’s recent book, Beijing Time, and refers

its new observations to the examples and premises in that book, which

are in turn informed by Dutton’s other work on policing and street life

in China.

Key words

alternative temporality j Beijing j revolutionary time j social order

j Theory, Culture & Society 2011 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, NewDelhi, and Singapore),Vol. 28(7-8): 321^339DOI: 10.1177/0263276411424917



City Character

If Tiananmen Square at dawn now captures the spirit of the nation,Panjiayuan at dawn is host to the spirit of capitalism. (Dutton, 2008: 222)

PANJIAYUAN IN Chaoyang district is the site of the ghost market.Named after the hawkers’ ghostly forms travelling through the nightto set up their stalls for a 4.30 am start, this fleamarket was origi-

nally developed so that impoverished noblemen might shop anonymouslyfor bargains, before daybreak, without losing face. Nowadays it is a mixtureof antiques, fakes and Maoist paraphernalia and kitsch (including recentlymade reproductions) (pp. 216^17). It is an appropriately cynical and nostal-gic enterprise, where Beijing’s relationship with its several pasts can bepicked over as the day breaks. Its importance to Michael Dutton and hisco-researchers, Lo and Wu, is that it exemplifies a city where ghosts areonly reincarnations of a market mechanism, and where even the mightiestof political tracts ends up, eventually, on a stall.

Great cities very often possess a character quite discrete from that ofthe nation in which they are situated but are nonetheless accounted meto-nymic of the wider geopolitical space, which they self-confidently eclipse,deride, and (mis-)represent. London, New York, Los Angeles, Beijing areall utterly ‘themselves’ and yet are also the touchstones of external andindeed local perceptions of what it is to be in Britain, the USA, China.This anomalous status is at once contradictory and strangely accurate, assuch cities do achieve a sense of national centrality whilst retaining and cel-ebrating their specific qualities ^ whether that be through the pragmaticsof brand maintenance, or through a deeply held sense of socio-culturalpride and particularity, or both. These cities are dependent on their peoplefor maintaining and performing their identities, but theirs is a learned per-formance ^ the cities’ histories are somehow greater than the sum of theircurrent populations, even though their people (resident, sojourners, andeven tourists) contribute to the confirmation and continuation of these nar-ratives in every small reiteration of the city’s life. Thus, the harder it is tograsp the fullness of a city’s ways of being, structures of attention, habitsof thought, the more likely it is that this city has that indefinable edge onits more parochial rivals. It has character far beyond its brand. Its attrac-tions include its successes and its disappointments, its sudden enthusiasmsand its negligence towards new arrivals. A small town may be bereft at theloss of youth leaving for big cities, and stricken at the passing of old peopleand old ways, but a city of character hardly notices such mobility ^ indeedit requires it.

Chaoyang district, the home of the ghost market, is currently ( July2011) the subject of not mighty but certainly very enthusiastic politi-cal tracts. The call for ‘magnificent Chaoyang’ on hoardings outsideyet another development site on Worker’s Stadium Road is part of awider campaign for the residential contribution to ‘socialism with Chinese

322 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)



characteristics’:1 orderly advancement, stability and mutual responsibilityamongst the people. Just around the corner from the main road, the noticeboards, which used to carry pasted-up newspapers for communal reading,carry detailed advice on managing internet use for better health in childrenand older people, and on re-designing one’s home layout to collect and userainwater efficiently. Two doors down from the local Thai restaurant, asmall flag hangs outside a minute alley home, celebrating the 90th birthdayof the Chinese Communist Party.

Figure 1 Panjiayuan market, April 2011. Photograph courtesy ofKirsten Seale

Donald ^ Beijing Time 323



Beijing Time (2008) is a passionate and idiosyncratic attempt to cap-ture the essence of one such great city. The book is therefore energetic,eclectic, and inventive. Those who spend a lot of time in Beijing will recog-nize the tone of the work as empathetic and sensitive to that of thecity itself. The narrative is structured as a journey from the architecturallegacy of imperialism to the street-level details of contemporary capitalismwith Chinese characteristics, or what we might call statist chaos. The book






Figure 4 Magnificent Chaoyang. Photograph courtesy of StephiDonald




is organized around three themes: temporality, sociality and aspiration. Thetitle refers to the first of these in an opening discussion of the competingdrums and clocks of imperialism, the grand railway buildings and bells ofVictorian foreign occupation, and the defiant and equally insistent hourlychimes of revolutionary time. The compulsion to manage time is brilliantlycaptured, and demonstrates how political powerbrokers are all alreadymodern in this key strategy ^ for time is space is power. As the hoursare marked by the ringing of bells, or the beating of drums, or the playing

Figure 5 Chaoyang alley on 1 July 2011, the 90th birthday of theChinese Communist Party. Photograph courtesy of Stephi Donald




of recorded music, so the progress of people’s lives is disrupted and orderedin a manner both random (why should a bell signify an hour passing, andwhy should the drums be obeyed?) and utterly predictable (the power torun time is premised on military might, just as the city squares are remin-ders of the troops that turn them from public spaces to parade grounds).In 1985, Chen Kaige’s film The Big Parade ^ a story of young recruitstraining for National Day celebrations in Tiananmen ^ showed that, despitethe immediate futility of repetition and physical pain, the phenomenon ofmen and women’s bodies marching in unison, ‘in time’, gives rhythm topower. Stating the obvious perhaps, but that’s why National Day looks theway it does.This attention to synchronicity provides the populace, marchersand onlookers with a performative end in itself. William McNeill arguesthat military drill is the ultimate musculature of politics; whilst ostensiblyabout training the body for battle, ‘keeping time’ is also about persuadingthe body into a passionate embrace of collectivity: ‘Words are inadequateto describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unisonthat drilling involved’ (1997: 2).

Acting in unison is likewise a function and pre-requisite of the narra-tive of revolutionary transition, entrenchment and order. The new times ofnew China were necessarily premised on the unity of the people under revo-lution. When that unity was challenged, the membership of the people wasre-defined and the ‘people’ re-unified through exclusions and uncertainty.Time was unpicked and re-started.The spatial authority of the Square exac-erbates these exercises of political power, but also exceeds the particularmovement or powerbroker of the day. The Square provides the temporalbeat and the spatial description of change and stability. As such it representsthe clock-time of the state whilst also constraining the emotional time ofthe people in and out of revolution. As Julie Andrews has noted in her ret-rospective on the images of selective unity from the Cultural Revolution,when those who had built new China ‘happily’ allowed their children to goto Tiananmen Square to see Mao in 1966, they did not realize that manyof them would become targets of their children’s movement to change therhythm of the nation (2010: 26^7; Dutton, 2008: 71). Now, their grandchil-dren and great grandchildren visit the Square as Reform tourists, to be pho-tographed in front of billboards proclaiming China’s harmoniousdevelopment. Beijing time and national belonging are announced as syn-chronous through the rhythm of this Square. The echoes of this rhythmbeat across China, although the beat is uneven, but not always fainter, thefurther one gets from the centre. From the outset of Dutton’s book thereforewe are reminded that control over Beijing time is both symptomatic andfunctional for the state, the empire, and the foreign chancer.

Beijing Time then tells the story of a city that has moved from one erato another, from imperial decline, to occupation, to Mao, to the market.The theme of time is pursued through a day into night exploration of thecity’s districts, and here the passing of the hours is conjured in the voicesof people that Dutton interviews, who convey a sense of a city that




accommodates both the sinews of Party politics and the sturdy texture ofthe city’s social and economic structure at the level of the street. Beijingpeople work, play, and fight together; they mark time together in a citythat refers only to itself. Belonging is an act of faith in the pre-eminenceof the city. Dutton quotes the 1980s/’90s rock singer Cui Jian: ‘The firstmoment you arrive in Beijing, you’re already a Beijinger. Yes, Beijingersare bastards’ (2008: 198). Yes, too, Beijing coheres as the seat of power andthe locus of unquestioned urban pre-eminence in the PRC. Whatever maybe happening in Shanghai,2 Nanjing or Chongqing, it is Beijing that holdstime in safe-keeping, or indeed lets the clock overrun. When Beijing work-ers came onto the streets in June 1989 to defend students running fortheir lives from the Square, revolutionary time was temporarily appropri-ated by a physicalization of the social imperative. The Party clock falteredfor a few hours, maybe weeks. Twenty years later, the clock has been recali-brated to deal more effectively with multi-temporality. Time in the city isnow oriented to asynchronous realities; to at once allow and appropriate theuncertain energy of migration, the busy sociality of the local population,and the increasing acceptance and challenge of world attention. This is hap-pening within an overall acceleration from the machine-time of industrialmodernity to the space-defying time of a mobile and aggressively connectedglobal economy.

Nevertheless, underneath this cacophony, the Beijing clock at the railstation still sounds the hour for the Party-state, and the early retirees ^under-qualified because of the Cultural Revolution’s impact on education,and unemployed through the economic rationalization under Reform ^while away their days in the parks, or on the mahjong boards in 1970s court-yards. Beijing is a city entered and lived through such complicated andvibrant human networks. They are defined and determined by the usualebb and flow of informal urban connections: the shared interests of markettraders and customers, for example, or the old men who fly kites togetherin the People’s Park, or the couples who meet up to dance ballroom andjazz outside theWorker’s Stadium or to sing old Maoist anthems; such net-works are created by long-term proximity ^ the residents of a district orneighbourhood committee who have known each other for 40 years; the uni-versity colleagues who attended No. 1 school or No. 6 school and who stillremember what they did together in 1967, and still cannot find the wordsto put it behind them and move on. Here is a city where one might meet acolleague’s wife for the first time over lunch and who introduces herself asa banner woman (an old Beijinger with Manchu ancestors), and will expectyou to know the importance of her forbears.

Can one understand Dutton’s Beijing without being a Beijinger one-self, and how long does one need to live there for that to be the case? Whatkind of time must one commit to a great city for the city to commit someinside knowledge in return? Is Beijing Time like the extended breath ofBrahmanic time ^ one Brahmanic hour equals 8.76 million years (Adam,2006: 121)? Does revolutionary time equal whatever is pragmatically




possible? And, if so, are everyone’s petty struggles to survive just infinitesi-mal seconds of the city’s attention, always subject to the clock time of Maoand his successors? On the one hand, this is probably so, on the other, theextent of revolutionary time is also indeterminate, and fragile. Lili, ayoung migrant from Gansu, takes the plunge into corruption and obtainsfalse qualification certificates so that she can work in this city of bells,songs and clocks (Dutton, 2008: 201^4). She joins up to the ‘public secret’that Cui Jian screamed out in 1989: if you want to be a Beijinger, you willhave to be a hooligan, a criminal element, a Beijing bastard. Lili is forcedinto the bastardry of false qualifications, she has no rights and yet everyright to be in the city. Without the migrant in-flow Beijing’s new economywould falter, and with that stumble would come the chaos of failure. Thechallenge now is to nurture all this new talent such that the next generationis as successful as it deserves to be.

Lili’s challenge is partly the familiar problem of big city provincialism.In the late 1990s there were, anecdotally at least, signs in small businesswindows offering work, but ‘only people with Beijing accents need apply’.The employment signs (if they existed) suggested the city’s apprehensionof invasion ^ not by overseas foreigners who can be incorporated andexpelled fairly easily ^ but by the provincial masses who converge on thecity in the shape of migrant workers, desperate to make their trek toBeijing worthwhile. For the migrant worker, the trip to the city may allowher/him purchase on the benefits of the new Chinese economy. But forBeijingers in 1998, and even today, the sight of a scruffy migrant workeron a bus, or jostling with thousands of others to get a mainline train homeat Spring Festival, is an excresence of the market, a necessary but hardlywelcome temporary addition to the urban landscape. S/he speaks with thewrong accent, s/he doesn’t belong in the laneways, or in the new high-risesthat have taken the place of many of them in the past ten years, and signifi-cantly, s/he reminds the aspirational middle class (zhongchan jieji) thatclass divisions, until the late 1970s the preserve of Maoist categories and cri-tiques, are now visible as haves and have-nots, as locals and outsiders. Inshort, the migrant introduces a further spectre of uncertainty into analready accelerated and highly charged marketization of everyday life.

That is the pessimistic view, and is perhaps becoming outdated. Moreoptimistically, the children of migrants are beginning to show up in univer-sities, their capacities fed by their parents’ dedication to their future. HuJintao talked in the 90th birthday speech about the need to focus ontalent, not background, and the opportunity that resides in China’s entirepopulation. The Federation of Unions recently recommended that modelmigrants could apply for permanent residency in Beijing ^ although upto now the maximum number of migrant workers named in the annualmodel workers list has been a modest 74, and in 2010 the figurewas 21 (Wang Wen, 2011). This possible window of opportunity may there-fore be much more about defining Beijing’s right to narrowly define thequality of its permanent population than a genuine effort to bring stability




to the lives of long-term rural migrants (Chen, 2010). In 2011, a story inThe NewYork Times magazine (Wong, 2011) reported that ‘up to a million’migrant workers are renting rooms in a warren of underground bunkers ^‘mouseholes’. They are, according to this one report, formally leased, andreasonably well managed by landlords.They may well be centrally regulatedin the near future. The dangers of fire and poor ventilation have not appar-ently missed the attention of authorities, although how they would rehousea million migrants with low incomes is not discussed.

But this is perhaps an extreme example of how the centre of moderni-zation shifts, and how those laying new claims to Beijing creep closer tothe centre of the city’s attention. In 1990, the hutongs could have beenseen as communally vibrant laneways of social cohesion, family history,and intra-generational connections. But another opinion was that they wereslums, and that the clearances of the past two decades have been aboutintroducing sanitation and the possibility of order into an unhygienic andinward-looking residential environment. Whatever view one takes, and pos-sibly both should be held simultaneously, the ‘mouseholes’ are presumablya symptom of transition which will eventually be cleared out, but the under-ground social networks, the markets, the stories of hopes and failures thatthey have surely initiated would be a good place to start for the next itera-tion of Beijing time. The accompanying photographs to Wong’s report inThe NewYork Times are heartrendingly inventive, and suggest a vibrancyand resilience that Beijing should treasure. One bunker has been turnedinto a studio to practise martial arts, and in another image someone hasstuck New Year paper cut-outs (male and female) under a handwrittendirection to the lavatories. This is what people do, what they have alwaysdone; this is how they turn the space into place, and become part of thefabric of the city’s social identity.

MovementsBeijinger identity has resonance and instant meaning in the way that beinga Londoner, a New Yorker or a Parisian does not require further explana-tion. The city confers character on the inhabitants and the inhabitants per-form that character (or range of characteristics) as if on cue. Their urbanstatus provokes extended narrative and a sense of expectation of oneselfand of others. The city’s places and spaces are the sum of the people whouse them, and vice versa. The substance of the urban is therefore evokedthrough personal anecdotes and snapshot profiles with current residents.In Beijing Time, the protagonists present as quintessential types (which tes-tifies to the aptness of Dutton’s choices of subject). Approaching these vign-ettes through cinematic standards of emotional and intellectual effect-through-affect, the protagonists emerge clearly and recognizably as part ofthe complex of Beijing-time. Cinema is a cultural form premised on themanipulation of time, movement, image, and character to produce a narra-tive. Incomplete, partial, and subject to aesthetic and generic forms and




paradigms, cinema produces place as a series of stories that allow imagina-tion to trump the limits of experience. Cinema does not deliver unassailabletruth but it presents symptoms of the real that become true in a certainfield of vision. Cinematic affect is, I would argue, the benchmark of urbanauthenticity for the contemporary metropolis, the complexity of which oth-erwise remains unsayable. Beijing’s cinematic character post-Reformincludes the pomposity of Party blockbusters, but also the crazy humourof, for instance, the comedies of Feng Xiaogang (and the hapless genius ofperformances of the comic actor GeYou). Other films, by directors such asWang Xiaoshuai, have consistently presented a strong sense of the undertowof messy lives, people who do not quite ‘fit’: migrants, youth, creatives,women, the old, the poor. Not always comic in tone, and sometimes criti-cized for emphasizing a predictable bohemianism, these characterizationsnevertheless reiterate the diversity of Chinese urban life.

In the opening sequence of Black Snow, Xie Fei’s desolately elegant1990 film on the passing of youth and the loss of hope in Beijing a yearafter the crackdown in Tiananmen, the camera tracks a young man’s backas he walks up the wide steps of the central underground at the Beijingtrain station. He is underground, and the camera does not seek out the tow-ering station clock face above. Watching this sequence in 2011 we mightassume that this man, Liu Huiquan, is an arriving migrant from anotherprovince. But the sequence cuts on action, and he turns into the tiny andincomprehensible twists of a residential laneway, or hutong. He must be alocal to find his way so easily. He reaches a nondescript dwelling, andbreaks in through the new padlock that someone has attached to the bat-tered door. We wonder briefly if this is after all an outsider breaking in tothe residential security of the hutong. Almost immediately the neighbour,Auntie Luo, arrives with a plate of food to greet him but also to make surethat he is supposed to be there: ‘I was let out early / . . . / Ah so the statewas gentle on you’. This is the homecoming of a convicted felon, but it is ahomecoming of sorts and, the sociality evidenced on his arrival, and whichhe himself emulates by visiting the family of a fellow inmate, seems atfirst to be still available to him. His time served, he may be able to re-enter Beijing-time unscathed. But as the film progresses, and Liu fallsagain into criminality, it is evident that there is no way back to the city’s pri-vileged time, to belonging and a future.

Beijing Time’s snapshots of a city piece together a version of the citythat is convincing but appropriately elusive. Their idiosyncracies, hubrisand fears fall into a textured pattern that belongs not merely to them butto the urban fabric of Beijing as a powerful, tangible idea. Dutton’s bestsources are, predictably, old ladies (and a few old men). Beijing’s residentialquarters always seem full of vigorous older women with red armbands,ready to pass an opinion, but Dutton’s anecdote reminds us that, whilstthey are garrulous and apparently in control of their local area, they arealso vulnerable. Their memories epitomize the frenetic engineering of revo-lutionary and social discourse in a city where, despite the consistent




authority of the Chinese Communist Party, tough politicians have squab-bled over power for nearly 70 years and used the populace to fulfil theirclaims to authority, which confers control of time itself. These older peopleknow that what seems stable can shift. It has done so before and will do soagain. I remember meeting an older lady in the Russian quarter of Beijingin 2003. She stopped to talk, but tried Russian before reverting toChinese. She had really wanted to re-use the Russian she had learned inthe 1950s when she had been sent to Moscow, before the Sino-Soviet splitin 1960. Of course, had I actually been a Russian speaker in that part ofBeijing in 2003, I would almost certainly have been bringing in furs forthe rag trade markets, and not particularly interested in the intellectualreminiscences of revolution. The old people in Dutton’s account would havebeen young children when one could still buy honeyed crab apples on thecity streets, and when the sesame sellers from Xinjiang were not there toremind them that the world of China has both shrunk and grown to uncom-fortably unexpected proportions.They would have watched the constructionsof the ten great projects in the 1950s (2008: 69ff), built by model workersbrought in from all over China. They might remember how welcome, ornot, this generation of heroic migrant workers was. They would have livedthrough the great uncertainties of the 1960s and 1970s, and the breathtakingpolicy changes in the 1980s, as capitalism was given its head. They wouldprobably opt for stability in the last years of their lives.

Dutton has a particularly keen eye for the seeming contradictions oflocal policing in the world’s largest authoritarian state (1998, 2004). Policeofficers guide their local constituents through the challenges of modernlife, but they also demand acquiescence to the social imperative. LocalPublic Security Bureau committees and residents’ committees contributeto the skein of information gathering and support to make this enterpriseof social management work. The tension between community care and sur-veillance is more evident for the young and marginal than for older resi-dents who need help. In Black Snow, the local policeman keeps a friendlyeye out for the probationary Huiquan, but Huiquan writes to his friend,Chazi (still in prison in the northeast): ‘I now have a job where they don’tlook over my shoulder, which is how I like it’. Huiquan has a market trader’slicence and is dealing in the rag trade, and this seems a relatively autono-mous way of getting on. The police license the street markets of Beijing,but ^ short of closing them down ^ they cannot undermine the semi-crim-inal logic of over production, the trade in ‘seconds’, and the huge income dif-ferentials that make them flourish. ‘Lili’, the young migrant girl fromGansu, unwittingly reiterates the relationship between the market and hersmall steps to criminal status, nervously obtaining false credentials on bor-rowed money, at least 20 years after Xie Fei’s fictional Huiquan got intothe selling of rip-offs from the factories supplying clothes for export.

Meanwhile, a residential block of septuagenarians in Beijing Timeare hard at work with their young female local policewoman to ensure acrime-free zone in their old-fashioned residential quarter. She wants them




to replace their old doors with security doors. This is somewhat contentiousas it would cut off easy access to the central courtyard which structuresthe flow of sociability and the possibility of neighbourliness to which theyare accustomed. How does one gossip behind a steel door, how does oneknow what to gossip about? They are spurred on partly by their idolizationof the lovely policewoman (Hu) who expends a great deal of effort listeningto their problems, and partly by their excited respect for a metropolitancampaign to find the most security conscious residential quarter in thecity. No-one articulates what appears to be a central contradiction: that thenew doors will undermine their relationships with one another, and thuswith the whole network of information, and security, that neighbourhoodcommittees are set up to provide to each other and to the police.The organi-sation of this campaign as a ‘movement’ (yundong) is familiar, however,both to the concept of community policing in Beijing and to the olderfolks’ long memories of other movements in every decade since Liberationin 1949.

Through movements, people are mobilized to achieve political, socialor moral outcomes for the city, for the Party, and for the state.They requirea certain narrowness of focus, a casting off of a different common sense ofa different era (albeit one of only a few months or years ago), the thrill ofmarching in time with the latest craze, and an implicit trust in the authorityof the leader. Movements have been deployed since the early 1950s as aform of continuing refinement of the revolutionary body and the desiredcharacter of the masses. Movements are essentially contradictory in purpose:they fracture and create unity of word and deed. Each new movementrecasts the uncertainty of belonging, but also re-forms the essential needto belong. In the present era of harmonious society, a pervasive concept con-ceived to counteract the unexpected effects of the disjunct and competingtemporalities of capitalism, movements ^ although aiming still to provideadherence to Beijing-time ^ are layered according to the temporality andspatiality of the fractured populations of uneven ambition and opportunity.In this case, the emphasis is on managing Beijing streets to avoid crime.The rise of crime, as described in Black Snow but evident too in Lili’sdilemma, is a threat to the everyday lives of the old Beijingers, but thethreat of crime demonises migrants and especially incomers from the farWest (Xinjiang), and is used as an excuse for ever-increasing public spend-ing on internal security.

Policing and security are also part of a much wider movement to pre-pare the city for international attention and, at the time of Dutton’sresearch, for an influx of domestic visitors for the 2008 Olympic Games.Such a movement neatly encapsulates the themes of Beijing that the bookhas prioritized. First, it creates another temporal envelope: each movementhas its own impetus and pace; second, it is intensely social ^ painfully sowhen the movement is directed against certain parts of the population asduring spiritual pollution campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s (and after1989), but relatively benign when it is used to create shifts of attitude




to (say) security doors (unless you are the domestic visitor/migrant/touristwho is presumed to bring criminality as well as tourist dollars into centralBeijing). A movement harnesses the communal energy of those involved ^whether for political status, for relative financial and personal security, orsimply to attain the relief of being ‘in’ rather than ‘outside’ the ‘people’.

The book’s emphasis on the contemporary yundong reminds us thatBeijing is a highly efficient political space which circumscribes, and collab-orates with, the sociability and systemic sociality that underpin everydayrelationships. Dutton’s colloquial approach investigates the subtle calibra-tions of humanity and politics, which allow this elaborate layering of timeand space to work to the advantage of the state. He nonetheless values thedetails of relationships, and so makes it impossible to write off the city asanything less than complex, arrogant and tough on the one hand, entertain-ing and touching on the other:

‘Don’t bother seeing us out’, says Hu as she disentangles herself from [the]tactile old lady and makes her way out the door. ‘Don’t bother followingus’, says Hu as the old lady follows us to the end of her street. (2008: 136)

Once aware of the robust sense of communal responsibility and fellowfeeling amongst these older people, one can begin to grasp the emotionaland civic losses incurred by required relocations to developments outsidethe city’s ring-roads. Such relocations, particularly of older people, arecommon to the program of accelerated redevelopment and upgrading of thecity’s accommodation. Beijing is changing, and sociality and leisure arethreatened by the anomie of urban sprawl, by the existential loneliness ofpoor migrants, and by the aimlessness of new and unmet aspirations. Itseems from Dutton’s examples that the old and the young feel it first.

Precarity

What we want to get rid of, tells us who we are. (Hawkins, 2006: 2)

Beijing Time’s finest section ^ both for its lyricism and for its understand-ing of parallel temporalities and uneven aspirations, and indeed in its tacitacknowledgement that migrants cannot always afford any sociality ^ is theextended description of the rag pickers’ market on the outside of Beijing.The rag pickers operate at a waste disposal site far removed from the devel-oped centre of the city, and the ‘market’ is generally unvisited and unknownexcept by those who make a living there. The stuff they sort out is thestuff that the city dwellers want to get rid of, at least until these unseenworkers have re-categorized it as raw materials by picking out the plasticbags, the bottles, and so on. The rag market is both liminal and central tothe logic of an economy based on accelerated growth, high-speed develop-ment and relentless urbanization. The rag pickers, mostly rural migrants,




are the human face of China’s waste management systems. Their jobs aresomewhere between the informal economy of the rag pickers of India’sslums and Brazil’s favelas, and an organized but highly unequal approachto use and re-use of goods made for export. Their labour is part of a globalsystem of waste evaluation and disposal. Human rag pickers may at somepoint be replaced by machinery, but the work will not disappear. TheChinese rag pickers are a contemporary incarnation of landless peasants,without resources and without status in a society that has reconceptualizedclass value since the onset of Reform in 1978, but also in the land enclosuresof the T’ang and Sung dynasties. There is here another layer of time thatbrings the past into rhythm with a largely invisible layer of the present.

Their plight (an emotive term that is justified) is a result of Reformeconomics. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the peasant classes enjoyed ashort spell of political legitimacy. They were part of the triumvirate of redclass excellence, gongnongbing (workers, peasant-farmers, soldiers). Posterart revered them. City students were sent to ‘help’ them and learn aboutagricultural labour. Even if their living standards were painfully low, andtheir actual needs for help woefully misconceptualized, their political statuswas good.That situation has gone. Farmers are now richer, or poor, depend-ing on their entrepreneurial savvy, their capacity to develop their land forcash crops, and their proximity to cities. If too close, they are liable to findtheir land eaten up by development, and if too far, the same thing mighthappen but with less media attention. The rag pickers in Beijing Time aredealing with the garbage. They are sorting through what China (andindeed consumers worldwide who send garbage to China for disposal)wants to get rid of, but they are themselves on the edge of disposability. Ifwe look at their condition through the lens of Hawkins’ comment on wasteand society, the rag pickers tell us that Beijing wants to be rid of the sightof poverty, and the tactility of refuse. This city also wants to be rid of thesight of generations who are barely employable and whose presence is decid-edly disharmonious.

So Beijing Time moves across the disjunctive spaces of temporalimbalance that the marketization project has brought to new, new China.Many are now richer than before (bi qian fu), and many have removed them-selves from the exigencies of rural life.They are free of the drudgery of agri-cultural labour, but in most cases the conditions of their urbanemployment are highly uncertain. ‘Precarity’ refers to the condition ofuncertainty that prevails at the lowest levels of the global labour market.Surely, national governments struggle to balance the needs of businesswith the security of the working population, but the competitive flows oflabour can be used as an excuse to manage, contain and control the work-force ^ through actual or threatened precarity. Combined with the state’scapacity to harm comes the state’s incentive to destabilize. Tari and Vanni’s2005 explanation of San Precario, Italy’s patron saint of those in precariouslife and work situations, is relevant to describing Beijing. Migrant labouris self-evidently precarious. The right to the city and its full services is




only granted by an urban passport, which migrants do not hold.Human ingenuity and social networks create other mechanisms for survival,but this is an existence where uncertainty is the prevailing condition.

The collective subjectivities and sociality of Beijing are produced bybio-political time management: by keeping in time, by marching in forma-tion towards the goals of modernization, a better life, and a more certainfuture, but by doing so in a generalized condition of precarity.Time is bifur-cated and fractious: both the clock-time of unassailable power (although itsvery beat betrays the state’s neurotic hankering for control) and the time ofthe market, which is insistent, multiple, and asymmetric. The city is full ofghosts, whose bodies are out of step: the lost souls in the rag pickers’ mar-kets on the city’s fringe; the tenants of the demolished hutongs relocated todevelopments outside the fifth ring road; the underground ghosts in theair-raid shelters, before they also get moved on. One subjective formationslips into the place of another as the city changes shape.Thus the human ele-ments are retained, recast and repositioned for its next iteration.

I am writing this review essay in a year, 2011, when Beijing timeseems again to be racing backwards. The stories currently coming throughabout arrests and disappearances of artists, lawyers and activists, and lat-terly of (‘illegal’) independent candidates for township and county elections,are depressing. The new euphemism on the streets ^ at least for thoseintellectuals who are likely to be targeted as general troublemakers ^ is beixiuxi (being asked to take a rest), another is being asked to have a cup of

Figure 6 Street cleaner, Beijing, April 2011. Photograph courtesyof Kirsten Seale




tea. It is timely to consider what time really means in an environment thatis so strongly over-determined by the whimsical euphemisms of revolution-ary time in reverse.

CodaThe discussion above indicates, I hope, that this is an evocative book. I dohave some criticisms, but these are small matters of style and address. Thevacillation between straight description, interpretive poetics, helpful interna-tional comparisons and scholarly quips is in part due to the main author’seasy familiarity with his subject, but it does pose a problem of emphasisand theoretical clarity. Concepts of the authentic, affect, community,public secrets, ‘we-ness’ are introduced with little explanation. Havingmyself spent time trying to come to grips with ‘public secrets’ in China(for instance), I was hoping for a discussion of how this book re-positionedthe term, but found only confident re-statement and thus an ellipsis of theconcept being deployed. Whilst the lack of contextual scholarship is verylikely an editorial decision, as the book clearly aims for a wide readership,this reduction of theory to a passing phrase can be irksome. Likewise, thewriting is sometimes utterly engaged and engaging (as in the passages onpolicewoman Hu and her flock), but there are also sections where the stylebecomes flowery, and occasionally the value of invoking other writers

Figure 7 Flags, Tiananmen, Beijing, April 2011. Photograph cour-tesy of Kirsten Seale




and oblique international equivalence is uncertain. ‘Let us take a leaf out ofBenjamin’s book and follow the style of the copyist not back into the text,but for a walk down the street . . . ’ (2008: 85). Benjamin’s defence of thepedestrian-witness is a lovely piece of prose, but whether it is really justifiedor required to introduce the decision to describe Beijing from the groundup is debatable, or not demonstrated. The strengths of Beijing Time derivefrom the authors’ historical attention to the persistent relation betweentime and space in the management of urban populations and in the produc-tion of affect, from their lively but serious contemporary conversationswith those who submit the narrative of their existence to a specific cityfate, and their grounded insights into the contradictions of a city that isboth highly managed and always surprising. In these achievements,Beijing Time makes the case for and against Beijing.

Notes1. Hu Jintao’s speech to the Party and the nation on 1 July repeatedly reiteratedthis terminology.

2. The East is Red also chimes on the quarter hour from the Customs House onShanghai’s Bund. Instated in 1966 as a chime to replace The WestminsterQuarters, it was ousted in the 1980s and reinstated in 2003.

ReferencesAdam, B. (2006) ‘Time’, Theory, Culture & Society 23(2/3): 119^126.Andrews, J.F. (2010) ‘The Art of the Cultural Revolution’, pp. 27^57 in R. King(ed.) Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution 1966^1976. Hong Kong:Hong Kong University Press.Chen, G. (2010) ‘Access to Compulsory Education by Rural Migrants’ Children inUrban China: A Case Study from Nine Cities’, Educational Research 1(10):512^519.Dutton, M. (1998) Streetlife China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Dutton, M. (2004) Policing Chinese Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.Dutton, M. (2008) Beijing Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Hawkins, G. (2006) The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Lanham:Rowman and Littlefield.McNeill, W.H. (1997) Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in HumanHistory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Tari, M. and I. Vanni Accarigi (2005) ‘The Life and Deeds of San Precario:Patron Saint of PrecariousWorkers and Lives’, Fibreculture Publications 5: 1^11.Wang Wen (2011) ‘Model Migrants May Get a Shot at Beijing Hukou’, ChinaDaily, 27 January. Available at: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2011-01/27/content_11924210.htm.Wong, E. (2011) ‘The Air-raid Shelter Apartments under Beijing’, The NewYorkTimes Magazine, 22 April. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/magazine/mag-24YouAreHere-t.html?emc¼eta1.




Filmography

Big Parade (Da yuebing) (1985) Chen Kaige, Xi’an Film Studio, GuangxiFilm Studios.Black Snow (Ben ming nian) (1990) Xie Fei, BeijingYouth Studio.

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is professor and Dean of Media andCommunication at RMIT University, and honorary professor of Chinesemedia at the University of Sydney. Her recent articles consider memoryand Chinese art in New Formations (forthcoming), and censorship and mas-culine anxiety in Theory, Culture & Society (2010). She was the curator oftwo iterations of the exhibition China and Revolution: History, Parody andMemory in Contemporary Art, in Sydney and in Melbourne in 2010 and2011 (www.chinaposters.com.au). She is currently working on a book onchildren in world cinema. [email: [email protected]]




Beijing Time

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Transcript of Beijing Time