(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
They did not fare well in the beginning as they struggled for survival single-handedly.
The suzhi discourse turned on its head, as the Guo sisters and their associates—all
with high suzhi—find themselves trapped in the urban environment as mortgage
slaves, mistresses, or “ant tribe.” 8 While people without high suzhi in the traditional
sense like Furong jiejie (Hibiscus Sister), have made it as “cyberlabrities,” personae
on the Internet who are “better known by their pseudonymic handle than by their
given name” (Senft 2000, 191), simply because they have a good sense of marketing
strategies in the era of Web 2.0 and a shamelessly enflamed ego (for Chinese
cyberlabrities see Lugg 2008). This is the antithesis of suzhi discourse unintended by
conservatives and morality defenders.
Furthermore, the suzhi discourse is incorporated into the neoliberal governance
through the “blame the victim” logic. The migrant workers in cities are blamed for
their lack of suzhi, just as local cadres blames peasants in the poor rural areas for their
low suzhi. Poverty and marginalization are attributed to personal failure in
educational attainment and to individual lack of competitive strength in the market
economy. This kind of logic is not just applicable to migrant workers or peasants, but
also to the less competitive among the aspiring middle class. In the television drama
for example, Haiping blames her husband Su Chun for lack of ability to make big
money. In online discussions, Xiaobei (Haizhao’s boyfriend) is blamed for lack of
competition with Song Siming, the powerful official, in the sexual power game.
Dwelling Narrowness tells us that there is no exception to the pitfalls of China’s
neoliberal urbanization and all is confined in subsistence-based moral-economy
claims.
The above discussion that is derived from the television drama Dwelling Narrowness
indicates that neoliberalism is unevenly and selectively applied in economic, cultural
and political spheres in contemporary China. It is a synthesized alternative to both the
Maoist socialist model and the Euro-American neoliberal developmental model. Its
“disingenuousness” in the Chinese context, demonstrated through the production,
distribution and circulation of the television drama, suggests that the alternative
8 “Ant tribe” (yizu) is a term coined by Chinese sociologists to describe young (post-’80s generation),
educated (with university degrees) migrants from rural China, who struggle to stay in big cities for their
dreams of a better life, with low-paying jobs and poor living conditions (often on the city outskirts in
shared living compounds). See Chen and Li (2010).
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