DAVID LEIWEI LI

WHAT WILL BECOME OF US IF WE DON'T STOP?"  ERMO'S

CHINA AND THE END OF GLOBALIZATION

IN HIS FAMOUS THESIS on “the end of history,” Francis Fukuyama noted the “ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants’ markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China.”  For Fukuyama the historical demise of communist utopias and the material signs of markets and commodities all over the world presage a global capitalist cornucopia that will resolve “all prior contradictions” and ensure the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”  This Hegelian understanding of history is rejected by Samuel Huntington, who, though agreeing with him on the abatement of ideological and economic frictions at the end of the cold war, predicts “the clash of civilizations” and warns of a “Confucian-Islamic” threat to the West. Huntington’s Weberian thinking reflects a tenacious Orientalist geocultural divide—uncannily resonant in the contemporaneous neo-Confucian triumphalism, however—that at once concedes the superiority of capitalism and challenges the Western symbolic monopoly regarding its origin and practice.1 Likewise, Tu Weiming affirms a distinctive East Asian variety of state-sponsored capitalism while advocating a set of “Asian Values” as a “critical and timely reference for the American way of life."  Resisting Huntington’s and Tu’s premise of civilizational difference, Aihwa Ong has recently proposed the notion of “flexible citizenship” wherein the elite nomadic Chinese subject turns into an emblematic figure of contemporary “capitalistic rationalities” and, to borrow from Arjun Appadurai, of “modernity at large.”

Within this diversity of recent pronouncements about forces of globalization that have both expanded and shrunk the world are two key questions. First, is capitalism becoming a universal form of culture that will override local practices historically circumscribed within the nation-state? An affirmative answer to this would imply a planetary cultural uniformity and a loss of local uniqueness. Second, is capitalism merely becoming a dominant mode of world economic production that only exacerbates national or regional cultural competitions? A nod to that would suggest the persistence of local distinctions impervious to the imperial presence of transnational capital. On the surface these seem to be concerns about universality and particularity, the destiny of the nation-state, and the predicament of individual and collective humanity. At their core, however, there appears to be a deeper preoccupation with the dialectic relationship between the economic and the cultural modes of production that our shared condition of globality has made especially urgent.

Ermo (1994), a Chinese film about the title character’s quest for the biggest television set in her county, dramatizes with extraordinary cinematic power and precision the globalization theories, development trajectories, and modernity debates that I have laid out. This comedy is the work of Zhou Xiaowen, doubtless one of the least known directors of the Fifth Generation, whose trademark cinematography of untamed hinterlands has left an indelible mark on the Western mind.  Unlike Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, who tend to divert their cinematic gaze from the madding pace of Chinese modernization through epic evocations of the archaic, the mythic, and the rural, Zhou adamantly refuses his generation’s “primitive passions” by directing his lens to the immediate dynamism of a post-socialist China in a fervent embrace of the global market.  It is true that in Ermo the village continues to figure an “earthbound” China, an enthnocentric continental mind-set and a land-locked way of life that have come to stand for the particularity of historical Chineseness. The project of a peasant woman purchasing her TV, however, already heralds a centrifugal outlook, inextricably infused with the work of globalization within and without Chinese boundaries, while inescapably burdened with the nation’s underdevelopment. In this manner, Ermo broadly engages, on the one hand, the decentering of “Chineseness” in “peripheral,” “greater,” or “cultural” terms by suggesting an emergent global modern with its universal economic and political structures as well as what Raymond Williams felicitously calls “structures of feeling.” On the other hand, Ermo treats with considerable rigor the protagonist’s specific negotiations with this global modern as the irreducible idiosyncrasies of the local. If the global modern represents the culture of capitalism in its various stages and national manifestations, the film seems to want to persuade us that there are indeed “multiple modernities” but perhaps no authentic “alternatives” to capital.  In the enmeshed transnational movements of objects, ideas, currencies, and images that technologies of the market and media have made possible, differences persist only through uneven encounters. Ermo’s departure from the village and eventual return to her unsettled origin thereby enact an archetypal allegory of the contradictory human quest for mobility and stability, autonomy and community, whose achievement amid the brave new world disorder appears increasingly daunting.