On Migrants, Media and Cultural Practices with Wanning Sun

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Source: Reuters
Over the past few decades, the world witnessed the unfolding of China’s ‘migrant miracle’  -- three decades of rapid economic growth underpinned by an unprecedented flow of cheap labour from the countryside to city. Today, however, economists say that the most dynamic phase of China’s transformation to an urban society is complete, labor and capital are becoming increasingly expensive and China is on the cusp of a long-term trend of reverse migration back to the countryside. But the central questions remain relevant: who are these migrant workers behind China’s economic growth--and who make up what experts call the ‘subaltern’ class of Chinese society? How have they attempted to operate within institutional constraints that inherently do not recognize their voice? How do they consume and reproduce the market logics and discourses that represent them? And lastly, how can the migrant voice find agency in a world increasingly mediated by digital media and technological advance?

In her new book, Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices, Wanning Sun draws on decades of extensive field work to comment on the role of media and culture in negotiating the unequal relationships that persist in Chinese society. In a special to the Duke East Asia Nexus, PhD. candidate Kevin Lin interviews Sun, Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, to comment on the cultural politics of inequality and to provide a Chinese twist to the age-old question: can the subaltern speak?
Congratulations on your latest book Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices. This is a conceptually sophisticated and ethnographically rich analysis of the cultural politics of China’s rural migrant workers. How did you develop an interest in the cultural politics of migrant workers, and what are the intellectual resources that you draw on?
 
In terms of academic training, I am from media and cultural studies. My work is informed by two people crucially influential to me in terms of both research methods and analytical angles: E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. Their work on working class culture in Britain is a constant source of inspiration, and I am proud to be able to draw on their enduring insights to shed light on the contemporary Chinese situation.
 
My earliest exposure to social change came more than twenty years ago when I had an opportunity to look at the lives of rural migrant domestic workers, specifically women who left their villages to go to the city and work in the homes of middle class families in Beijing. I went to Beijing over the course of the next three years, each year staying for three months living amongst the urban residents, most of whom had domestic workers. The three-year ethnographic/anthropological account from 2004 to 2006 led to a book called Maid in China.
 
But having come from a media and cultural studies background, I found it impossible to talk about these sociological labor issues without looking at the cultural representation of the rural migrant workers as marginalized figures. Nor was it possible for me to look at the figures of domestic workers without looking at their relationships with their employers. I was interested in the cultural politics of inequality and how class politics takes cultural form. In their case, the question of how class inequality as well as social and economic inequality get represented and negotiated in the context of cultural and media production becomes very important. I was interested in how the media represents the maids, how television dramas construct stories of the maids, and how urban residents imagine what it means to be a maid.
 
I then extended the research to rural migrant workers more generally and asked what is the relationship between class and cultural politics, or how is class politics represented in culture. I have the conviction that culture does not only reflect social inequality—it constitutes inequality. In other words, culture has a role to play in shaping inequality. Under this overarching conceptual question, I started looking at cultural production at the government, mainstream, and grassroots levels.
 
In your book, you conceptualize rural migrant workers as a subaltern class. Can you explain what you mean by subaltern class and subaltern politics and how you use this concept in the context of contemporary China?
 
The subaltern studies are a critical theoretical and intellectual movement, consisting of a group of scholars from South Asia and Latin America. Even though it has been in existence for decades, it has not been taken up seriously in China Studies. Of course, I am not the first one to use the term in the context of China if you look at anthropologists like Dru Gladney, Gail Hershatter, Yan Hairong, Pun Ngai, and Lisa Rofel.
 
The best translation of subaltern is diceng, a spatial metaphor literally meaning “at the bottom,” referring to social groups marginalized and dispossessed economically, socially, and culturally.
 
I am centrally concerned with how to answer the question of how we can answer the question ‘can the subaltern speak’ in the Chinese context. It is not that the subaltern cannot talk; it is that they do not have the institutional means of having their voice registered and recognized. Because subalterns speak outside the lines of representation laid down by official institutions of representation, their speech does not have a structure or institution where it can count, so it ultimately does not catch or hold.
 
I want to engage with this to see how a concept born in the second half of the 20th century on the Indian subcontinent can travel temporally and geographically to contemporary China in the 21st century, and to see how subaltern politics gets played out amidst the collision between the state and capitalism. This also has the benefit of further revising and enriching the subaltern politics perspective.
 
A lot of people talk not so much about subaltern class but about working class. What is the relationship between the subaltern and the working class?
 
I am equally interested in the notion of working class, but I am less interested in class as an objective index of people’s incomes. Rather, I am more interested in class as the subjective identification of the self as belonging to one particular class. I follow E.P Thompson and see the making of class as a process. To quote Thompson, class consciousness is how class manifests itself in cultural terms. I believe that in order to have a particular class politics, you need to have a cultural politics that goes hand in hand with that, without which class politics cannot be sustained.
 
To give you an example, in contemporary China a lot of the cultural discourses and narratives revolve around a glamorous image of the middle class, its consumption power, its lifetime and sensibility. Class politics is about promoting the middle class but also rationalizing and justifying the discourse that serves the middle class. All that happens in the cultural domain is sometimes mistaken by some social scientists as secondary to social relations. Cultural politics is not external to social relations. It goes into the process of shaping social relations.
 
At the center of your study is an analysis of the ways in which workers are represented and represent themselves. Who represents them, and how do they get represented?
 
You have to look at the mainstream hegemonic construction and then ask how individual workers position themselves in relation to the mainstream. My research looks at three processes: the hegemonic construction in the mainstream, the experience of migrant workers as represented by themselves or by labor NGOs who like to think they represent workers’ experience, and in between them, the cultural establishment—that is, writers and journalists and such who play the role of cultural brokering in speaking on behalf of the workers.
 
Once we have figured out who is subaltern, the next question to ask is: what shape and form do subaltern politics take? Many see the subaltern as either completely duped or totally submissive, or resentful and totally oppositional. But these positions are not tenable. The subaltern groups take many different shapes and forms. Some identify happily with the state’s perspective, but others totally reject the position. Some of them are not happy to go along with the way the cultural establishment represents them, but others see a lot of possibilities in working and collaborating with middle-class professionals. Their positions are strategic, situational, and geographically uneven: workers in southern factories may have a more established sense of the workers’ identity and subaltern identity, whereas people who work in northern China in more isolated and cellular environments like the domestic workers I studied may have fewer opportunities to articulate subaltern subject positions or engage in subaltern politics.
 
You begin your work by looking at the news media and urban cinema, and you explore the figure of construction workers as both the subject and consumer of news and films. Why choose news and cinema, and what does this tell us about the cultural-political construction of the migrant worker subject and how it is consumed by construction workers?
 
The reason I studied news is that in any modern society news is seen as the most authoritative way of representing social reality. Whoever has control over how news is produced has control of social reality. But news production is in the hands of the state in China. It is important to use news as a prism through which to look at how migrant workers are represented by the state.
 
I chose the issue of workers seeking wage arrears because it is a perennial issue, particularly for construction workers. How journalists cover this kind of news tells us a lot about how sensitive the state feels about workers at any given moment. I traced the changes from the early period when this kind of story was covered in a compassionate manner, then to the later stage when it was covered through a law and order framework. I used it as a case study to show how the dominant construction of subaltern groups works. But at the same time, it does not mean that workers necessarily relate to the news. I am interested in how the most subaltern group relates to the most authoritative form of representation.
 
Even though cinema is not as dictated by the state as journalism is, it is governed by the logic of the market, so it is still part of the mainstream. Cinema, in the form of urban comedy, has given a lot of attention to the plight of migrant workers. In this context, I ask the question of how the market uses its logic to represent workers in a certain way. What kind of social reality is included and excluded from that kind of representation? Workers need to be represented in an authentic way for the audience to relate to them and go see the movies because this is based on a market mechanism. But you cannot tell the story in a way that socially challenges the state. Thus, how does the market negotiate this tension? That is the question I would like to ask.
 
Would you say the changes in framing, for example, construction workers over time is a reflection of state policy and state attitude?
 
Yes, and it also reflects the political climate of the particular political regime. For example, in the early stage of economic development, workers are simply treated as cheap labor without respect to their rights. But as social justice and a social harmony discourse appear on the agenda, there is more emphasis on justice for the workers. The maintenance of stability becomes more important. But at the same time, the state can never afford to make the environment for capital too stringent, so they have to be harsh to workers. It depends on how the state and market intersect at that particular point.
 
In terms of consumption, would you say that because cinema is perhaps primarily oriented toward a middle-class audience, the representation of migrant workers has to be shaped by the audience it targets?
 
My ethnography suggests that rural migrant workers are just as interested in seeing films, particularly comedies, because they find work very hard and at the end of day they want to see something funny and entertaining. So comedy is actually their favorite. Even though most people who go to the cinema tend to be urban middle class because it costs too much to buy a ticket, this does not mean workers do not access the film—they watch online and through pirated copies. It is actually an industry in its own right. Subalternity is also an experience available for consumption.
 
How a person watches a film says a lot about a person’s class background. What makes a middle-class person laugh or cry does not necessarily make a rural migrant worker laugh or cry, simply because some of the experiences they relate to is class specific. Rural migrant workers like some of the comedies, and they like films they can relate to. They are not very discriminate about whether it is produced by the market or by the government, overseas or in China, as long as it resonates with their experience. They like to reflect on their class experience through the experience of watching films. Some of the NGOs originally thought that in order to raise workers’ consciousness they would show workers films about workers. But workers say they do not want to watch them. Workers may get inspired in a way that you cannot foresee.
 
Every year during the Chinese New Year Festival Gala, you get some representation of migrant workers or have migrant worker performers. How do you see their representation?
 
This relates to the politics of recognition. From the point of view of the state, how do you assess the political, social and economic value of migrant workers? For example, do you see them as agents of social change because workers during the socialist period were the political backbone of China? Giving some representation of migrant workers through this cultural product is a way of saying that we recognize you for the contribution you have made. But just how genuine or superficial is this recognition? Is it reflected in policy implementation? Are they as important to China as the middle class from the viewpoint of the state? If you are willing to give recognition that gets reflected in policy implementation, then it is a more profound and genuine form of recognition. There are various levels of recognition. The politics dictates that some recognition is given, but the more important level of recognition is withheld due to the unequal distribution of power and wealth.
 
It is interesting that this politics of recognition is based on recognizing a certain image of migrant workers: almost always hardworking, honest people, for example, who contribute to economic development. But at the same time, there is no recognition of workers’ collective agency and them taking collective action.
 
Yes, a very bracketed and conditional form of recognition they are given.
 
Beyond being merely the subject and consumer of media, you talk a lot about rural migrant workers’ self-representation, their role as the producers of small media, television programs, documentaries, and photojournalism. What are the challenges and contradictions that come up in this attempt at self-representation?
 
It is impossible to generalize the level of involvement of rural migrant workers in cultural production. Some workers in certain sectors are more conscious of the need to represent themselves than others, so it is uneven and patchy. A lot of cultural production in the form of poetry writing, literature, documentary filmmaking, and photography tends to be produced or initiated by cultural workers associated with labor NGOs. You can see them as the more politicized and more politically conscious segment of the subaltern class. They see themselves as having the task of not only representing workers but also initiating, inducting and educating workers to help them become more politically conscious.
 
But also spontaneously and from the grassroots level, quite a few dagong poets come from the assembly lines, and fictions are written by workers, and photography of workers are taken by workers themselves. It is interesting to raise the question of technological literacy. Following Raymond William, the formation of class consciousness is contingent on a certain level of literacy. While these workers may not necessarily have the highest level of education, they may be just as technologically savvy as their middle-class counterparts, if not more so. Since everyone has a smart phone, it has become much easier now to document life. They use visual representation as a very effective way of representing self. I tried to provide a nuanced conception of how and why workers produce visual materials. There is a celebratory image of workers producing visual materials in order to come up with representation of their struggles, giving the impression that everybody is using digital media for a social cause. In reality, most people take selfies for fun, sending them to friends purely as consumers. That has nothing to do with political consciousness. We need to be careful not to extend or exaggerate the level of possibilities that technologies give.
 
What are the subject matters and narratives that appear in workers’ production?
 
A whole range of topics and discursive purposes. Some productions look at work and living conditions and workers’ experience in bargaining with management, while some of the more strategic ones educate workers. What I find most interesting are the ones that document the places between the urban and rural, because the spaces where rural workers live serve as historical, digital archives, performing the role of self-appointed visual historian.
 
Rural migrant workers do not produce their culture alone; they also do it in interaction with a range of individuals and groups in the process. You mention labor NGOs and intellectual elites in particular. What are their roles in this cultural production? And, how should we understand the relationships between rural migrant workers, labor NGOs, and intellectual elites?
 
The relationship between the intellectuals and workers has always been there—this is not unique to the current period. A lot of literary production about the workers’ experience comes from both workers and middle-class professional writers sympathetic to workers’ lives. Even among rural migrant workers who write poetry and literature, there are different views as to whether only migrant workers can write about their own experiences as otherwise they could not possibly be authentic. Some would say that it does not matter who produces the work as long as they are familiar with and sympathetic to the workers, and as long as the experience they write about is something that workers can relate to. Some see outside writers as opportunists trying to speak on the workers’ behalf, while others see them as potential allies who can get out the workers’ voice and lend support. I am interested in the cultural brokering, a strategy taken by both sides. Dagong poets and writers are always dogged by the question: once they become famous and write a good book, are they still workers and do they still represent workers?
 
Migrant-worker poetry has gained prominence recently because of the poems left behind by a migrant worker who committed suicide. How has migrant-worker poetry developed?
 
Dagong poetry actually started in the 1980s when the first generation of migrant workers started to come to the cities. These workers had a much tougher time than subsequent generations. They had to go through urban surveillance and police harassment, and they had to have residential and work permits. Their situation was really bad in the 1980s and early 1990s. Particular cohorts of migrant workers from the Sichuan and Hunan provinces came from families with literary backgrounds and could read and write quite well. They experienced so much pain and hardship that the best way to do something about it was to write poetry. It’s simple and immediate: You can write 4 or 8 lines. You only need a piece of paper. You don’t need a publisher. It does not require a lot of time. So a lot of people initially write poetry as a way of coping with the hardship of everyday life. The first generation of migrant workers helped build the solid foundation of dagong poetry.
 
Since then, dagong poetry has developed a lot but no one wrote about it as a minor literary movement until the early 2000s. There was hardly any attention in English-language scholarship paid to dagong poetry until a few years ago, I myself was one of the earliest to write in English about dagong poetry. Interestingly, dagong poetry is now not so much about the description and narrative of how hard it is to survive in the city or how hard it is to be exploited or treated badly. It has become an existential question of who I am and what I am doing here—I am in the city and I cannot go back now because I have got nowhere to go back to, but the city does not take me in. So where do I belong? Where can I go? It expresses more anxiety, vulnerability, and uncertainty. The early dagong poems are more protests and cries, whereas the latter ones, while also politically fraught, are more concerned with existential angst.
 
How should we understand and analyze their poetry? There has always been debate about whether to judge their poetry on the basis of artistic merit or on how the poetry reflects the working-class experience.
 
I see it essentially as a debate about class positions, a debate about cultural tastes and cultural capital. For those who support and like dagong poetry, they would argue never mind about the supposed lack of artistic or literary merit—as long as the poetry moves us, it does not matter how raw and cruel the language is. But others say that while the poetry may be powerful, they prefer to judge it on the basis of aesthetics. At the end of the day, it is a debate about whether you want to see it as a political discourse or artistic work. And some representatives of the literary establishment use aesthetic and literary standards as a way of exclusion. Ultimately it is about class exclusion and inclusion, and it is a contestation over cultural capital.
 
But among workers themselves there is internal tension. There are workers who started out producing politically punchy and edgy poetry, but after becoming recognized and accepted into the mainstream, began producing something that is far more polite. Some even say, “I am a writer first and a worker second. I don’t want to be limited by only writing about workers’ experiences. I want to be considered a writer.” And sometimes, because they detach themselves from workers’ experiences, they start to write about other things that they do not write very well about, so they actually lose their advantage.
 
Finally, what will be your next research project?
 
The project I have embarked on extends my previous research and focuses on the new generation of rural migrant workers. Instead of looking at their cultural production and consumption in general, I focus on their practices of romance and intimacy. The question I am concerned with is still about the class-specific experience and the cultural politics of inequality. But I ask the question in the context of emotion and affect: how does social and economic inequality shape the emotional experience of workers? I do not subscribe to the view that love conquers all and that everybody has equal access to happiness and love. I think inequality shapes the way people practice love and intimacy.

Kevin Lin is a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney