Myths of Americanization in China
Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N.
RECENT COVERAGE of Chinese events demonstrates that the American media's strange love-hate relationship with the People's Republic of China (PRC) is alive and well. Now, as in the past, we...
...From that point on, the burgers-and-bowling theme has ruled at least until mid-July, when this is being written...
...Watching Disney cartoons on television was a regular once-a-week ritual in Shanghai that year, both for foreigners (starved for any familiar sort of entertainment) and Chinese urbanites of all ages (starved for variety...
...Another thing aiding the Shanghai boom is the increasing prominence in the Politburo of political figures with ties to that city...
...One of its main functions is to help the government raise money to support state-run industries, and its stocks are divided into two classes, one of which can only be purchased by foreigners...
...Some of these officials have been delighted to see Shanghai surpass Canton as a trading hub and reassert its status as China's leading metropolis...
...Clinton claimed, in a Beijing speech, that one reason he made the trip was to help Americans get a "full and balanced picture of modern China...
...DISSENT / Fall 1998 theme...
...Entitled Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia, it is a treasure trove of interesting detail on the diverse ways that Big Macs are consumed and viewed in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan...
...He was complaining that he missed the nightlife in his home city and found London's a bit boring, an idea that intrigued me, given my experiences in Shanghai a decade ago, and made me want to find out just what it was he did for fun...
...A still-faster turnaround took place on the day U.S...
...This is deeply troubling, especially because misleading imagery can and does affect government policies as well as the popular imagination...
...One should never assume that buying a stock or watching a Disney cartoon has the same significance in China as in the United States...
...We get occasional (justified) comments from demonizers about women being coerced into having abortions...
...That globalization isn't wiping out all cultural specificity was brought home to me again by a brief conversation I had a year ago, in England, with a young lawyer from Shanghai...
...Edited by Harvard anthropologist James Watson, it should be required reading for all American journalists about to be sent across the Pacific...
...His next comment showed how wrong I was: "Bowling," he said, "is for girls...
...Curious about the Americanization myth, I visited one of the new McDonald's in Beijing during my last trip to China in 1996, and I was struck by an atmosphere quite different from that of a typical American outlet...
...He shows as well how the large number of one-child families affects everything from marketing to the handling of in-store birthday parties...
...president Bill Clinton reviewed the troops at Tiananmen and then held a televised joint press conference with Jiang...
...No survey of symbols of Americanization would be complete, finally, without a consideration of McDonald's—the corporation whose supposedly homogenizing power has led to the coining of the term "McDonaldization," a dystopian equivalent to McLuhan's rosier imagery of the "global village...
...Take cell phones and beepers...
...The main thrust of the most recent coverage, though, has been that the PRC is becoming Americanized not just Westernized, but Americanized...
...TO BE FAIR to the American media, there is a handful of very good China cor-respondents who like to ask and answer these sorts of questions, and occasionally pieces that do this make it into print or onto the air...
...One value of the book is that it highlights the intraregional contrasts that have marked the way McDonald's has become part of the culinary, economic, and social landscape of different East Asian cities...
...Those entranced by the Americanization myth sometimes describe an actual female yuppie...
...It is based on close observation of the creative process by which real people react to new products and pracPOLITICS ABROAD tices and put localized spins on transnational phenomena...
...The general pattern remains constant nonetheless, with just one key difference: swings between demonization and romanticization, which used to take place over the course of years, now occur much more quickly...
...Some commentators have, of course, continued to work in brief asides about, say, humanrights problems that remain unsolved...
...DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 25...
...This is because even the most seemingly "global" or "universal" of symbols can end up meaning very different things in different places...
...Remembering a big billboard for a new bowling alley that I had seen in Shanghai in 1996, I asked him if that was a place he missed...
...This certainly happened in 1989—an earlier time when the Americanization myth was dominant...
...In addition, though it is often cited as symbolic of China's increasing interest in connecting with the outside world, the Shanghai stock market's development has a good deal to do with the rising tide of both nationalism and localism in the PRC...
...How do Chinese of different generations treat Big Macs, he asks, and do men and women view imported fast food differently...
...Luckily, there is a wonderful new book that provides a thoughtful analysis of the McDonald's phenomenon...
...JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM is the author of Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 1991) and is working on a book on Human Rights and Revolutions coedited with Lynn Hunt and Marilyn Young...
...One is that there are literally hundreds of millions of Chinese rural dwellers who have never seen the Golden Arches or tried to roll a strike...
...One general problem is that we end up hearing very little about things that do not fit easily into either story line...
...The media continually measure the economic and cultural distance the Chinese have come in recent years in specifically American terms—the number of KFC franchises per city, for example...
...Now, as in the past, we see shifts between periods when China is presented as a big bad place that poses a threat to all we hold dear and periods when it is presented as a land of decent people on the verge of converting to our ways and buying our products in record numbers—as soon as they overcome the lingering hold of a few outmoded traditions...
...It is true that—thanks in part to the speed with which images of demonization and Americanization have given way to one another—the coverage has felt considerably less one-sided of late than is often the case...
...It also distorts our understanding of Chinese ideals and practices...
...Yan asks questions about eating at McDonald's that could be (but all too rarely are) posed about other activities, from protesting to using the World Wide Web...
...All too often, however, such pieces are axed or their impact is minimized by a flood of other sorts of reports that ask only "how bad is China...
...Or consider the features of the Shanghai stock market that make it so different from New York's...
...Some dissidents carry beepers so that sympathizers within the state-security apparatus can warn DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 23 POLITICS ABROAD them when a crackdown is planned...
...What is the impact on familial customs, as well as diet, of a new type of restaurant...
...or "how soon will the Chinese become like us...
...And a changing China—where burgers are for lovers, democracy is for nationalists, beepers are for dissidents, Mickey is a rat, and bowling is for girls—is just too interesting a place to be viewed as a mirror-image-in-the-making or the worst nightmare of a foreign land...
...Does income level matter...
...When he scoffed at the idea, I assumed I had offended him by suggesting that a refined, cosmopolitan person would engage in what many Americans still think of as a déclassé sport...
...They also failed to grasp that the student activists themselves were inspired as much by patriotism as by foreign ideals, that they wanted to get the Chinese Revolution back on track, not derail it, to make China strong on its own terms, not Americanize it...
...For example, in the spring of 1997, with the Hong Kong handover looming and books such as The Coming Conflict with China making headlines, demonization was in vogue...
...It certainly does, but just what it means that McDonald's has arrived in China (and vice versa: in the United States now, Mulan dolls are being given away with "Happy Meals" and Sichuan dipping sauce is being offered with McNuggets to provide a "taste of the East") is a very complicated matter...
...WHAT PROBLEMS are there with the current image of China as a land of burgers and bowling...
...karaoke bars, to cite just one example, are more numerous than bowling alleys...
...Unfortunately, juxtaposing contrasting images of a generically despotic and rapidly Americanizing place does not provide a "full and balanced" picture of anything...
...Just how it was different was hard to tell from a single visit, and I was not interested enough to go back a second time...
...It is not just that assessments of the positive or negative aspects of the Chinese scene are exaggerated, but that there are too many silences on major issues...
...In addition, both the demonization and Americanization myths foster misunderstandings of specific things going on in the PRC...
...We learn from Yan that Big Macs are viewed as part of a "stylish foreign cuisine" in Beijing, yet classified as bread snacks that happen to contain a bit of meat, as opposed to meat-based main courses...
...Surely it means something that McDonald's has gained a foothold near Tiananmen...
...In the end, thanks to their failure to make room for complexity, the demonization and Americanization myths, which seem to be opposites, turn out to have much in common...
...just as the Americanization myth obscured the fact that the "Goddess of Democracy" was a complex symbol with Chinese as well as foreign referents, it obscured the influence of non-American struggles ranging from South Korean student protests to South African hunger strikes and the extent to which nationalistic and democratic desires intertwined at Tiananmen Square...
...This imagery obscures the extent to which China is being influenced by many different foreign cultures, not just America's...
...The political distance China still has to travel is also being measured in a similar fashion: it is common to hear reporters asked about the prospects of democracy taking hold say that the trends are positive, but we should not expect to see national presidential campaigns in China anytime soon...
...There are also many migrant workers living in ramshackle urban squatters' camps who would not dream of dining at a nearby McDonald's, since such a splurge would cost them many a days' wages...
...Everyone in the city knew Mickey's name and what he looked like...
...POLITICS ABROAD Nevertheless, we seldom hear any serious discussion of the complex ways that economic reforms have been affecting Chinese women, for better and worse...
...In its lead-up to the first event, the American media trotted out every possible variation on the big bad China 22...
...By the time the press conference had ended, however, images of Americanization were standard...
...This point came home to me with reference to Mickey Mouse, known in China as Mi Laoshu, during my first trip to China in 1986...
...In doing so, it demonstrates just how misguided it is to speak generically of "Asian values," "Asian traditions"— indeed "Asian" anything...
...An admission: on that trip, the restaurant whose bizarre meaning as a transnational symbol I spent more time pondering was a flashy Beijing eatery called 24 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 "Auntie Yuan's Chinese Cooking from New York...
...Yan describes the development of novel customs such as the employment of personal greeters—nicknamed "Aunt McDonald"—who establish long-term relationships with young customers...
...Essays such as Yan's move us closer to getting a "full and balanced" picture of China than do a score of magazine articles that speak in a very general way about how Chinese lifestyles are changing...
...The burgers-and-bowling imagery also leads to a distorted understanding of the experiences of even those young Chinese professionals whose life stories the American media find so fascinating...
...Many other apparent symbols of "Americanization" can be dissected in similar fashion...
...The excellent chapter on Beijing by UCLA ethnographer Yunxiang Yan also shows just how often decidedly non-American meanings and practices have become associated with McDonald's in the PRC...
...It was allowed to expand before 1997 as part of a general effort by the national regime to ensure that when the handover took place, colonialist Hong Kong would not seem by far the most modern of Chinese cities...
...There are some novel aspects of the current situation...
...The Chinese deserve better...
...We also learn that Beijing McDonald's restaurants are often seen by young couples as romantic dining spots, and that families sometimes go there to mark special occasions in a relatively formal setting, as opposed to ducking in for casual getaways when too tired to cook, as in the United States...
...The idea of an "evil empire" has displaced the "Yellow Peril" and "Red Menace" in the rhetoric of demonizers, for example, and those promoting the Americanization line have a new set of favorite images, which involve describing China as a land where people go bowling, buy stocks, and eat Big Macs...
...This, plus the fact that "laoshu" can mean "rat" as well as "mouse," made it natural that when an official health campaign to eliminate vermin was launched, posters went up that showed Mickey being stabbed through the heart with a stake...
...By October of that same year, however, thanks to the smoothness of the handover and Jiang Zemin's plans to privatize the economy, the Americanization myth was back in fashion...
...Consider, for example, the damage done by the current burgers-and-bowling fantasy...
...Captivated by the media's focus on students quoting Tom Paine and rallying around an icon reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty, Americans often failed to realize that many of those who took to the streets were workers angered by official corruption—not the absence of democracy...
Vol. 45 • September 1998 • No. 4
