Abstract
2008 was a year of great importance to the People’s Republic of China. In the west, the Wenchuan earthquake left at least 4.8 million without homes. Meanwhile, unrest ballooned in Tibet. 2008 was also a turning point in media consumption — geopolitical events and natural disasters were not just broadcast over cable news but were circulated on the blogospheres of the mid-to-late noughts, and the PRC was beginning to edge out the United States for the highest number of internet users in the world. This was also the year of the Beijing Olympics, the pinnacle of achievement in China’s use of modern media to rebrand itself. The opening ceremony was a spectacle of modern China, capturing the many ways China was willing to reinvent and rebuild itself in a new model of development and eschew its ideological ties to Maoist Marxism, instead embracing the political economy of neoliberalism and homo economicus that shaped Western politics. The opening ceremony affirms the principles of capitalist production through mass choreography, which Siegfried Kracauer understands as an aestheticization of Taylorism. Though China’s aestheticization of industrial production is rooted in socialist aesthetic tradition, it has been retooled to better fit a country that is more driven by GDP growth than socialist reconstruction. My project illustrates that criticism of China should not be misdirected by neo-Cold War rhetoric, but encompass the ways that many of the problems with Chinese governance boil down to China’s assimilation of the guiding principles that direct “liberal” western nations.
Presenters
Amber LevisStudent, History, Literature, East Asian Studies, Harvard, Massachusetts, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Sinofuturism, Neo-Nationalism, Techno-Orientalism, Media History, Globalism, Soft Power, Cultural Politics
