You Had to Have Been There: Laughing at Lunch about the Chinese Dream

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeYou Had to Have Been There: Laughing at Lunch about the Chinese DreamJudith FarquharJudith FarquharPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhen I arrived in Beijing in July 2014, a friend who works at a university there told me that, a few days before, a high official in the Communist Party (CCP) headquarters had denounced the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), apparently for being too leftist. My friend said, "We all think this is some kind of black humor on their part." This invocation of black humor—the phrase was in English—instantly made sense to me. Understanding both why the Communist Party needed to be taken quite seriously and why its funniness was also patent, we laughed. But why? How did a dark threat issuing from party headquarters translate into a shared laugh for academics belonging to two different continents and relying at times on a "foreign" language?Much of this essay will be devoted to this kind of question about the translatability of humor, and it will suggest that much more than a punchline is funny.1 Though my friend's remark about party central's attitude toward the left deviations of some social researchers was not exactly a joke, it was certainly a form of levity. The pleasure we felt in our shared ability to appreciate the tortuous (il)logic of an official pronouncement was made possible by a complex shared knowledge of modern Chinese history and institutions and considerable experience of the everyday life of Chinese mass media. It was not only a fieldwork moment for an ethnographer; it was also an expression of a certain moment in Beijing, one that is now past or passing. To get the joke, you had to have been there, and you had to have been then.Anthropologists often remark that jokes are especially untranslatable; some have told me that they seldom really really laugh in the field, experiencing a return to Chicago or New York or their family culture or English language television as a "return to laughter."2 It is as if we never can educate our gut—the place belly laughs come from—to live comfortably either with other people's sober proprieties or with their violations of them. When obligatory and thickly nested local frames are both invoked and exploded in a joke, much of the point is lost on those of us who are not entirely there and then.3 As visitors, we are usually relative newcomers to the world thus framed and thus transgressed, so we don't even see what proprieties and commitments might be at stake. Shouldn't criticism of a research institute issuing from party headquarters in Zhongnanhai be taken seriously? Presumably this news is bad, or black, because the party configures and supports the institutional structures allowing some people to live as intellectuals. If this CCP policy maker is serious, lives and jobs might be at stake. Why is it also possible to see this denunciation as comical? Presumably because some representative of the party has failed to notice that the intellectuals reporting to him have been doing exactly as directed, keeping the Chinese communist dream alive, helping him and his government do their job in a one-party state where all academic institutions are publicly governed. As the audience of this (by now not very funny) joke, I find myself simultaneously worrying about the dark implications of a high cadre's outburst and laughing at the way the weapon has been turned on its user, showing up the fault lines in the party apparatus in a not quite typical example of socialist black humor.4We anthropologists—at our best—are thoroughly relativist in our efforts to appreciate distance and difference; we pride ourselves on being experts at cultural displacement and even transgression.5 Even so, the classic work in anthropology tends to have no sense of humor. When we translate joking behavior from our field sites the humor tends to be read through to find those enframing structures or invariant principles that might be challenged or reinforced (or both at once) by a play on words, a ludic pratfall, or a paradoxical contretemps. Jokes tend to be thought of as a light-hearted text that indexes a very serious context,6 and when they are analyzed to reveal their architecture and foundations, anthropologists and their readers are in danger of becoming numb to all possible pleasure in the moment itself.A. R. Radcliffe-Brown published the classic treatment of joking relationships as two essays in his Structure and Function in Primitive Society. His treatment of a disrespectful or teasing practice, which he found distributed around the world in correlation with certain forms of lineage politics, was markedly scientific and sober. In the two essays, there is one joke described and that only in part:There is space for only one illustrative point. A very common form of joke in this connection is for the grandchild to pretend that he wishes to marry the grandfather's wife, or that he intends to do so when his grandfather dies, or to treat her as already being his wife. Alternatively the grandfather may pretend that the wife of his grandchild is, or might be, his wife. The point of the joke is the pretense at ignoring the difference of age between the grandparent and the grandchild.7In reporting this instance of humorous behavior, Radcliffe-Brown was not trying to suggest that bawdy grandmas and disrespectful youngsters are a universal formation in society. His comparative science worked at another level: once we understand why standards of propriety are relaxed between individuals occupying particular positions in a rigid kinship structure, he argued, we can look for similar transgressions in those other societies that share the same kinship structures. In other words, humor functions as "the means of establishing and maintaining social equilibrium in a type of structural situation that results in many societies from marriage."8 Analysis of "joking behavior" in the hands of the anthropologist reveals little more than the dead-serious structural imperatives that constrain and give meaning to social action. Of course there are many problems with Radcliffe-Brown's structural-functionalist privileging of stability, "equilibrium," and systems.9 But though he seldom felt it worth his while to actually present a joke in translation, he does appear to have considered jokes to be translatable once they were understood in context. He presumed that actions that at first appear odd—describing a new policy statement as black humor, for example—should be legible as quite rational and normal, once we understand (soberly, of course) the whole "structural" situation.10In this essay I will continue some parts of this anthropological tradition by presenting some exchanges that had me laughing—really really laughing—with others, in the field.11 On one hand, I follow Radcliffe-Brown's example in showing that locations in space and time, gatherings of place and history, and conventional formalities and proprieties are the irreducible field of the funny. Insofar as joking transgresses the normal givenness of its world, it is thoroughly situated; it behooves us to understand both Rabelais and his world.12 But, on the other hand, I also want to dwell on the joke itself before reading through it to the social field in which it plays and from which its humor may or may not be translatable. I will thus touch only lightly on the contemporary Chinese political terrain across which joking walks and talks. The etymologies of translate and transgress suggest wordplay and fancy footwork, and I want to appreciate these leaps and bounds. At the same time, I will show that joking is done by fully embodied people whose lives are specific to histories and localities and thus difficult to understand in isolation.So let's reconsider the black humor of a Communist Party functionary. What could be humorous about the central governing structure of the Communist Party turning against China's most elite social researchers? Statements like this from CCP headquarters at the time were greeted in the US academy with a very bleak outlook. American China studies specialists expressed fear that we would all be denied visas and our Chinese colleagues would be silenced on every matter of social and political concern. (These fears continue and are intensifying as I write in late 2015, as new anticorruption policies and information disciplines begin to have an impact.) Many of us expected our Chinese academic friends to be sunk in despair. Instead, we have found them sharing hilariously plausible conspiracy theories over convivial meals and speculating about who is the funniest comedian among senior cadres in CCP headquarters, as well as whether anyone in the party compound of Zhongnanhai actually gets the joke.I think you had to have been there, up to your neck in Chinese academic politics for a long time, to see the black humor in the situation. You would have to have known in your own practice that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is the party's kept think tank. You had to be accustomed to CASS's looming presence in the knowledge industry—huge and long-standing and heavily funded by the government. You would have been aware of a large number of prominent intellectuals—philosophers, historians, sociologists, Marxist theorists, social theorists, area studies experts, humanists—whose careers were entirely attached to CASS. You would have known that the leadership in CCP headquarters had often involved CASS intellectuals in the policy process through formal consultation and collection of their research results. And complaints about CASS's internal research funding competitions, in which the aim is to design and propose valid research that answers the questions posed by the state, would be fresh in your mind.The critic who attacked CASS in June 2014 argued, apparently, that too many researchers at CASS are being "corrupted" by their involvement with transnational NGOs and other "civil society" organizations. There was also the suggestion that CASS theorists are too allied with the Chinese New Left, which is well known for its critical stance that favors some old Maoist and socialist values and opposes many of the newer business-friendly neoliberal policies that encourage privatization and market freedoms. My particular friends who were "laughing at [the CCP] Leviathan"13 also knew that a large part of the CASS charge during the last two years or so has been to research "the Chinese dream."14The Chinese dream has been ubiquitous in the PRC mediascape since about 2013; one sees "public service" posters everywhere featuring drawings of fat happy children, assuring us that the Chinese dream is "my dream," or "the people's dream." A very interesting Wikipedia article notes that "according to the party's theoretical journal Qiushi, the Chinese Dream is about Chinese prosperity, collective effort, socialism and national glory" (among other things, but see the joking conversation reported below). These ideological labels are rather vast and vague, and turning such propaganda categories into socially useful alliances of actors takes creative social research. This is part of CASS's job, but the task has frustrated many in Chinese research units over the last couple of years.15If you had been there, then, the ridiculousness of this CCP leader's criticism might have been quite clear. His was a paradoxical critique: the Communist Party suddenly found its kept intellectuals, its policy mouthpieces, to be too darn socialist. And this was a charge by communists against communists, disvaluing the earnest labor of perhaps the only group of intellectuals in the twenty-first century who were still trying to make a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist social theory a plausible guide for the people of a modern nation. The unsettling message of the joke is: "All critics of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'—otherwise known as neoliberal laissez-faire market piracy—Beware!" Some Communist Party leader might tar you with the brush of "civil society," revoke your research funding, and make it nearly impossible for you to make the Chinese dream your own. Especially if some people fail to realize that he must have been joking.But what about the Chinese dream; is it a joke all by itself? This was the subject of the jolly conversation to which I want to devote the remainder of this discussion, partly reporting what was said and partly sketching the explicit and implicit elephants in the room as we talked. (An elephant in the room is a pretty good joke in itself, with its juxtaposition of large and small, wild and domestic, lovable and terrifying, and undeniably visible yet totally ignored.)Later in July 2014: My collaborator Lili Lai and I are in Kunming, Yunnan, which is rather far from Beijing and the CCP headquarters at Zhongnanhai, at a university where I gave a talk. We went to a department-sponsored lunch, in a restaurant's private room, with five college teachers. I asked them, what is this Chinese dream I see all over the billboards and on TV? What is included in it?The charming senior professor at the table, Professor He, said "I haven't got a clue, I'm no Communist. Ask a Communist! Teacher Li here is a party member, ask her."Teacher Li admitted, however, that she also wasn't sure, but she hazarded a guess: "Freedom? Justice? Equality?" Teacher Chen, another colleague, followed up with a reference to last year's big propaganda category: "Surely it also includes a 'Harmonious Society'!"This remark broke everyone up, especially Teacher Chen himself, whose face split into a huge grin with a giant belly laugh. In a place like Yunnan, more multiethnic, rural, and subject to borderland conflicts than many Chinese provinces, these intellectuals were understandably sardonic about the party's multiyear (and now not very evident) harmonious society campaign. By 2014, none of us were seeing public slogans about social harmony any more. Moreover, the harmonious society had not, we guessed, been subsumed within the newly ubiquitous Chinese dream. Propaganda history doesn't seem to work that way. So Teacher Chen's joke, in a few words, dredged up a bit of arguably "tragic" history—the harmonious society had never really been achieved, after all—to suggest that the Chinese dream was bringing it back as farce. The logic of the Eighteenth Brumaire is never far from contemporary Chinese senses of history—or senses of humor.As we continued to talk about the "meaning" of the Chinese dream, everyone realized that they had no idea what this ubiquitous term the Chinese dream was supposed to include. Not only was the referent lost, nobody present had—up to this point—cared at all what it was. And this was the cause of a lot more laughter. Unforced, uncynical, trusting laughter, unafraid of seeming childish. Our amusement (or in this case I should perhaps say their amusement) stemmed from a shared awareness that we were not properly receptive subjects of the propaganda state. After all, it is the party-state that talks of the Chinese dream, so it seemed like we ought to care. And know what all the fuss was about.I said, it sounds like there's nothing especially Chinese about this Chinese dream. Is it different from the American dream? So our group went to work trying to the American dream. Teacher has in on the of individuals their way up to and through and but I told her I thought it was than the American dream is that every can get this I was a much Chinese state the state that a few can get first everyone will get or at The of an American dream with the Chinese dream, we could would place on a neoliberal terrain that at the logic of more or to the but we had not the of what the specific of the Chinese dream might thought it was that they be of it but they also of propaganda language with and a sense of My at that are specialists in words, after all, and they found it that there's a whole of language that been them, even though it is got her and the Chinese once in a while would ask her if found a and she would say with an of no has of she said, but none of it Teacher party her and this would have the Chinese dream in she knew the The Chinese dream, she said, an of the values of national national and among the social The was a little that to this this kind of knowledge is the of official Professor He said she must have thought we were a on her or her a whole group of official information from a How is situation was it actually was we were on Teacher very sober and already Even as our she seemed serious on the subject of the Chinese dream, Professor He that she a joke was being on We could all understand the "I not of the who thought she might be the of a The of all this wordplay were the but Teacher would have had to have been there to see everyone as a party Teacher Li had through of political since the Chinese dream was by the Propaganda in These are to everyone in a leadership get the language of policy understand its and think through to and the in this the Chinese are one of the that institutions of government and give them But they are also where everyone is a little and the are even in for the to up and the and for those in to look the other way. not as if Teacher Li had these some new and even at times thought about the implications of principles like for her work at a university in Kunming, in that was being by our joking however, was a perhaps especially because we are all academics in like of our work the social that (or the of even as we realize that everyday life everywhere and such Though we don't it much in our shared field at that the work of a between life and between and words, is what we and This labor of to a world is what we as social are all So this of good before at the was an to notice little or really about the in which we We the and jokes that all the of modern over and the I have a and reading of Chinese state propaganda from the Maoist This from the rather of some experts on the Chinese of the Maoist and I that propaganda like the now the Chinese dream, are a form of even though they do not in a of that the and one in the classic and especially their happy were in the present of Chinese lives and But these happy socialist were not to be a news they were not to they were a more than the of the contemporary Chinese to with the people's toward a The of a socialist propaganda is its of an situation that can be read as being within the of its a little more and collective good should they all the that up to a everyday can be like that, I don't know whether the of the Chinese dream on to the for of for my But it was that no one the as state A dream possible I contemporary my colleagues would to the being for them by the state Propaganda is not to suggest that academics in China are by the state. To make their relative distance from the (or of a little I want to another joke that up at that same all, and not to too much of the on our friends on the proprieties of with A few had to be however, so at one point Lili to me in a to our colleagues at the I followed with a of my I them good my own Professor He I should have said I was them "my own He told a very joke, he said, in this a a of a and who while a in Beijing actually in the The official got all not what one to the leader in the He you actually to the your own He analyzed this He said everyone this because the is a and a it partly the presumed of even the most in this so far from Beijing, the of (and of much dark And of course it a on the part of who they are being by who are in senses of the But it also a to see the national leadership as made of and rather than and and In some then, this joke about in the was the same one that had been our academics in to other that they have no of the meaning of state on The referent of all the has not only for intellectuals but even for government can the and the attached to the that the of state really is made of has not even serious they are to be about official At they have the college really jokes there so different that transgressions in one appear only as in the there within some that an at its but that appear only as or in another Is state propaganda a joke or are there or that appreciate its the of The joking I have in this essay to such some in which a whole situation in contemporary China is into a specific After all, those of us at were all Chinese world of contemporary At that none of us felt especially to the black humor New sociologists, issuing from party headquarters at The we had as we to the Chinese dream can be in the world that we had in and some of the we when it was history, like the can get policy of the be taken for among We shared a so some did not to be there was an in this a of pleasure in sharing our to laugh at and to make of official and of the time, the values of socialism and the Chinese dream are part of the we while we our life and work in Chinese But the by joking conversation a distance between even when these are is to it was only because we could laugh at the central state propaganda that we knew we were to at a from the state could be the other to our we laughing for different or in as we worked to the Chinese dream? this a case of same different any maker of jokes really know if those present are laughing with him or at There may have been some of at that in But that we all knew from and with in embodied practice, that jokes are not supposed to translate it that we all found a way to really really laugh about research state and the of those a it must be that we were not really laughing about such we were laughing within them. This was more than a collection of critical in paradoxical or we were not sharing or If our had been about politics, the of that all would have been more there, for could much more knowledge about academic life in a Chinese than I have so there were certainly I And there may have been among these colleagues the and convivial of our conversation that even as a could not but that may have everyone There is much that we did not have in yet our of the and both and The that we so with so much is the that we were all there and all then, the big joke of state for from within the in the Chinese Communist Party propaganda apparatus get the they see the of the situation in which values are as a shared dream for The is that they do they are not in a structural to share the of the in the is not to the is it would not do for him do to in wordplay or paradoxical The that modern of do are different from but not than those of or be an of the of in Jokes up at all in the everyday life of state in as they do in other modern