What is between you and the edge?
A review of Margaret Hillenbrand's book on artistic portrayals of precarity in modern China
Pan Xiaoting, a 24-year old Chinese social media influencer, made videos in the style of mukbang, a genre of performance wherein users eat huge quantities of food in one sitting. Pan died in front of her fans during a July 14 livestream.
Pan’s death occurred despite Chinese authorities’ targeted attempts to curb the mukbang video trend. That Pan persisted in making her videos, despite both official efforts to stop and, reportedly, concern from her family about the health consequences of the practice, betrays more than her own personal determination.
It is also indicative of a broader demand among Chinese social media users to consume such tuwei (土味) content. In On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China, Margaret Hillenbrand describes tuwei as “untranslatable” but encompassing “all things lowbrow, uncool, folksy, coarse, crude, bawdy, awkward, inept, basic, hometown, homespun, and homemade—the antithesis, in short, of upmarket and hygienic human quality.”
One of the book’s central themes is the concept and authorship of “quality.” On the Edge is a study of artistic expression from those who have not benefited from the country’s modernization and, contrary to the party’s teleological narratives surrounding historical forces and inevitability, plausibly never will. As the state has failed them, many have in turn failed to live up to its fixed definition of suzhi (素质) — human “quality.”
Photo credit: SOAS, University of London
Xi Jinping’s current favorite slogan—“new quality productive forces”—is focused on high-tech development mechanisms, which inherently hinge on labor (read: humans). He might similarly imagine them as, ideally, “high quality.” Hillenbrand’s subjects are proof that, possibly to Xi’s dismay, China still has a sizable population of what could be called low quality unproductive forces (not in the normative sense, but based on their rejection of the rejection they have experienced).
She calls this experience “zombie citizenship” — described as “the paradoxical process whereby segments of society are rendered surplus yet remain within the body politic.” They are suspended from Chinese society, which has bounds defined by government policies spanning movement, housing, and labor. But they’re not expelled. They maintain a tappable use for the nation in the form of their possible future labor output.
Hillenbrand’s portrayal of zombie citizens and their cultural forms of protest and subversion traces online performances of tu-ness, including indecent exposure and consuming excrement. One chapter specifically follows microcelebrities on the social media platform Kuaishou who make content that is discordant with the social mores envisaged and practiced by more economically privileged residents of first-tier cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen). “To cash in, sometimes substantially, via a cultural entrepreneurialism that trades in excrement is a gauntlet thrown down to the go-getting ethos of China’s Internet+ manifesto,” Hillenbrand writes.
The trend casts doubt on what exactly viewers should be running to go get (is it not all shit in the end?). Another chapter focuses on “cliffhanging” and its higher-stakes cousin, the suicide show, or tiaolou xiu 跳楼秀— a practice among construction workers of threatening to throw themselves off buildings as a last resort to recoup unpaid wages.
Cliffhanging is a prime example, Hillenbrand writes, of a multi-pronged confrontation encompassing art, class, and politics within a cultural moment characterized by expulsion. Suicide shows, filmed with mobile phones in order to be shared online (and in some cases broadcast in the news) invite the members of China’s upper classes to be solemn spectators.
That performer-audience divide comes on top of the employer-employee power dynamics that inspire the shows in the first place, creating a second cross-class clash. The lucky, the home-safe viewers, are exposed to the labor exploitation their comfort derives from. As Hillenbrand writes, for the underclass performers, cliffhanging “literalizes the experience of being suspended precariously over the void—or actually tumbling into it” and simultaneously “metaphorizes that process for those watching anxiously from the wings.”
She features an incident wherein a Zhejiang news broadcaster described cliffhanging as “choosing the wrong route towards obtaining labor rights.” The broadcaster does not offer a preferred path through which construction workers can or “should” attempt to collect compensation that has been withheld from them. The criticism doesn’t just lack empathy; it lacks grounds.
To carry on Hillenbrand’s analysis of the haves and have-nots, the citizenry and (or versus) the precariat, a news broadcaster’s state-sanctioned takedown of workers’ attempts to be paid for completed work contributes to the broader social division between the in and out groups. The selection and presentation of “news” often generates a subject and object, a wise analyst and a daft pot-stirrer who is depicted as misguided and flawed. Her sin: creating disruption by confronting reality — a choice that is reliably inconvenient in most settings.
One video, taken just before Chinese New Year in 2017, in Lingbi County, Anhui province, opens with blurred images of four emergency services personnel, shot from behind, who are staring into a white space. It appears blank. They are trying to talk sense into an invisible fifth person, who is ultimately shown a minute and a half into the video due to a trick of the light.
He is clinging tightly to a metal window frame. “His body enacts—as gesture—the precarious state of subsisting somewhere in the no-man’s-land between normative citizenship and its zombie shadow,” Hillenbrand writes. At the end of the video, authorities forcibly drag the man away from the window ledge. Per Hillenbrand, they take him into detention, “thus making him hostage to the very legal system his protest was attempting to access.”
Though they are presented in back-to-back chapters, On the Edge doesn’t portray the shift from taboo short video skits to cliffhanging as escalatory. Rather than ramping up the real life stakes, this order carries readers deeper into Chinese transgressive cyberspace. Hillenbrand thereby resists the temptation to score analytical points by “graduating” her point to the level of suicide shows, over-relying on their tragic intensity.
Instead, we leave room for the life or death stakes of everyday life, through subtler trends that might actually be more poised to lead to broader social change. The number of people willing to sympathize with a weird and funny video is greater than the number of people willing to risk their own lives for payment remittance.
Kuaishou creators featured in the book refuse to calibrate their behavior to follow the playbook for success authored by the same government that has made them increasingly susceptible to socioeconomic precarity. On the Edge cites research from Zhai Wenting and Shi Xiaobing who note the platform’s users are mostly young; 74% are under 24 years old and underpaid; 70% earn less than 3,000 yuan a month; 87.6% have not attended university; and only 4.8% live in first tier cities.
“What does it mean, then, when those who are most commonly derogated for the lack or lowness of their human quality make a full pivot from apologetic striving to an unabashed embrace of their so-called social untouchability?” (From On The Edge)
In addition to performances centered on smiley depictions of the grotesque, (eating shit, overeating) the chapter on Kuaishou microcelebrities includes skits that poke fun at tu culture by flipping the narrative such that characters coded as “high class” end up looking petty and boring, while the resourceful tu heroes transform into victors, sometimes becoming self-made fashionistas.
Some videos show them using implausible but entertaining DIY beauty tactics (duck feather for eyebrow pencil, red chili pepper for lipstick, dress made of cabbage leaves, bowties made out of old socks, facemasks made of tomatoes and cucumbers, raw egg white instead of hair gel).
These performances and their main ingredients, readily available in rural households, are nowhere near what officials in Beijing have in mind when they tout the development power of “new quality productive forces.” Hillenbrand cites Hojin Song, who argues this “new modality” focuses on “unproductive practices that result in valuable capitalistic outcomes.”
Proudly tu creators harness their ambivalence toward the state’s claims of future happy endings to escape the socio-economic performances that would be necessary to achieve them.
In contrast to peers who are adherent to social norms and the inevitable economic and political good they cultivate, allegedly “low quality” members of the underclass question and perhaps obstruct them. By simply living—without aspiring to become a cookie-cutter version of themselves—tuwei creators are fighting an uphill battle.
In a country where content is highly regulated, popular originality always carries the risk of consequence. Where public humor has strict yet unclear boundaries of tolerability, a video showing characters pursuing what they are told they should be running from is in itself disruptive.
These videos might endanger their creators or force a confrontation with authorities they would rather avoid. But when you’re already On the Edge, the precise number of centimeters separating you and the abyss is not always your primary concern. Plenty of Hillenbrand’s subjects find it easier to put themselves slightly more in danger than run the risk of losing their personalities as well as their prospects.