(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
Kipnis points out, “Reference to suzhi justifies social and political hierarchies of all
sorts with those of ‘high’ quality gaining more income, power and status than the
‘low’” (Kipnis 2006, 186).
As the elitist suzhi discourse is naturalized as part of the popular discourse, it also
becomes incorporated in the neoliberal discourse. As Ann Anagnost’s study suggests,
suzhi/quality is “the quintessential expression of how subjects are set up for the
rational choice making that grounds China’ capitalist transformation (Anagnost 2004:
192). The anxiety generated by the increasingly competitive society is apparent in the
urban middle-class parents who invest heavily in their only child’s education so the
only child can outcompete other kids in college entrance exams and securing a job in
the city. To get high suzhi through education is the only way for migrant workers and
their children to find themselves in a short cut to their material and urban dreams. The
Guo sisters in the television drama came from a little town in the province. Their
aspiration to stay in the metropolis is realized through education. It is not a
nationalistic discourse of suzhi, but purely individualistic and survival strategy for the
would-be middle class aspirants.
Inherent in the suzhi discourse is the neoliberal logic of autonomy, choice, self-
improvement and entrepreneurship. All characters in Dwelling Narrowness have
internalized the suzhi discourse as a self-governing and self-disciplinary technology in
postsocialist China. It may not be linked with the Maoist era norms and values of
obtaining high suzhi in order to better serve the country. Lisa Hoffman (2006)
examines how neoliberal techniques of governing in China is linked up with Maoist
era norms and values of serving the country to produce the new professional, selfenterprising
subject, who “harbour neoliberal ideas of self-development as well as
late-socialist patriotism” (562). She argues that the replacement of job assignments
with job fairs for college students upon graduation is an example of choice as a form
of government: “choice and autonomy are a part of the governing and subject
formation processes” (553). This technique of governing through freedom of choice,
or intervention through non-intervention, subjectification through autonomy, is a
neoliberal technique of governance.
The Guo sisters made the choice to come to the big city to study in order to stay there.
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