Stephanie Hemelryk Donald

Tourism and the branded city: film and identity on the Pacific Rim

Comparing the major Pacific Rim cities of Sydney, Hong Kong and Shanghai, this book examines world city branding. Whilst all three cities compete on the worlds stage for events, tourists and investment, they are also at the centre of distinct film traditions and their identities are thus strongly connected with a cinematic impression. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book not only analyses the city branding of these cities from the more widely researched perspectives of tourism, marketing and regional development, but also draws in cultural studies and psychology approaches which offer fresh and useful insights to place branding and marketing in general. The authors compare and contrast qualitative and quantitative original data as well as critically analyzing current texts and debates on city branding. In conclusion, they argue that city branding should contribute not only to regional development and identity, but also to sustainable economic well-being and public happiness.

A Taste of Class: Manuals for Becoming Woman

This discussion addresses the making of woman as postsocialist class-object, developing our core notions of class-making and spiritual homelessness through an exploration of the forms of the feminine in the taste structures in contemporary urban China. The key observation is that beautification, sexual styling, and spiritual/cultural cultivation are consistently linked in narratives of “becoming-woman” in a newly successful genre of aspirational literature, which we are calling “manuals of elite civility.” We argue that these narratives may be understood in reference to catachresis (Tani Barlow, 2005), in the sense that we engage it as a descriptor both to the underlying term of analysis middleclass (which has several translations but no absolute referent) and to the middle-classnuren (feminine person) of our attention here. The second, related point is that the construction of the “new” modern woman in China, as made-to-be-looked-at in these manuals, betrays a fascination with class that responds to the emerging masses who aspire to, or have achieved, middle-class levels of wealth. Such fascination reinscribes women with a sexual ontology (as in nuxing) as well as an evacuated, reformed historicity (as in the exit of funu and the reentry of nuren). These manuals of elite civility on bookshop shelves hint at the effort of becoming that characterizes contemporary Chinese identity. Place, gender, beauty, consumption, and memory are brought into a relation with one another as they service the emergence of a self-identifying middle class. Becoming woman and becoming class is possibly twee in these coffee-table iterations but is never ultimately a cozy story. Performative female narcissism will conflict with the agency of women in Reform China as they go about the business of making class work for them in their everyday lives. The market is itself an ambivalent master, complicated yet further under the encouraging gaze of the Party-State. While the books perform a perfected loop of timely nostalgia and aspiration, the boundaries of class and taste will remain contentious in practice, and the search for distinctive femininity with its more unabashed dreams and longings may well exceed the “safe cool.’”

Seeing White−Female Whiteness and the Purity of Children in Australian, Chinese and British Visual Culture

In this paper, I interrogate the expression and usage of ‘whiteness’ in Australian, British and Chinese visual culture. My approach is through reading local texts with an eye to transcultural systems of meaning, paying particular attention to the ways in which whiteness is used as a doubled category in sexual politics. The paper is formed through the performance of cross-cultural connectivities within an epistemological emphasis on the travelled theorist. The movement between Chinese, Australian and English ethical positions are constitutive of the perspectives expressed here; the perspectives are themselves concerned to look back and into those ethical positions. The performance works towards a recognition of the semiotic systems of power and identity, and therefore of the conditions of theoretical performance itself.

Book Review: Fire on the Rim: The Cultural Dynamics of East/West Power Politics

Typhoon Deguan hit Hong Kong on Tuesday, 2 September 2003. The level 3 tropical storm warning was issued in the morning and the level 8 at 1.30 p.m. By 4 p.m. the city had effectively shut down; shopping centres were still, the traffic was gone, most people were home and safe, waiting for the onslaught. It arrived at 10.30 p.m., a double-eyed storm of great ferocity, but not one with devastating impact in Hong Kong Island or Kowloon. Hong Kong ‘did’ very well, and the morning newspapers were full of praise for the authorities, especially the education services that had sent children home early. The South China Morning Post was somewhat disapproving of young people standing unprotected on the waterfront watching the great wind blow in, but there was, overall, a sense that the city had managed beautifully. The following morning, a small audience watched a film from the south China social realist school of the 1950s, Typhoon Signal 10 (1959). The film deals with the poverty of Hong Kong migrants and a typhoon, that wrecks a shanty-town and orphans two children. A cutaway from the panic to a luxurious jazz club in the city shows people dancing, oblivious to the suffering outside. The film pursues these juxtapositions and thus portrays the social downside of development. The hero, Lee Shin (played by the great Cantonese socialist actor, Ng Cho-fan), is a construction worker dying of a severe stomach ulcer, while the young heroine pays off the community’s debts to money-lenders by working as a dance hostess in the jazz club. It is a classic tale of exploitation on the fringe of society. The film is nonetheless upbeat, emphasizing the politicization of poverty as well as the despair. In 1962 an actual typhoon (Wanda) killed over 100 shanty-town dwellers in the Western districts. There is still poverty and under-employment in postcolonial Hong Kong, and there are plenty of new migrants, predominantly women from the Philippines, but one needs to look to the Mainland for the contemporary parallels to Signal 10. Typhoon Deguan moved north on Tuesday and Wednesday into Guangdong, the province where Hong Kong enterprise employs up to 9 million people. The storm killed 32 people in Shenzhen’s Bao’an district, 16 of whom were migrant workers camped in a construction site at the Xitian Industrial Village. The newly erected factory collapsed as soon as the wind struck, the ‘cement’ crumbled away, and the ‘steel’ girders collapsed. The developers have fled.

Symptoms of alienation: The female body in recent Chinese film

(1998). Symptoms of alienation: The female body in recent Chinese film. Continuum: Vol. 12, Censorship and pornography, pp. 91-103.

Education, class and adaptation in China's world city1

This discussion draws on a series of field‐work visits to the Shanghai Television University and the Shanghai Media Group between 2003 and 2006. In that period the impact of a new economic rationale, whereby workers must skill up or ship out of the workforce, was keenly felt both in the service industries and in the lower echelons of professions. The University provided an opportunity to adapt oneself through new qualifications and thus through a constant re‐figuration of the working self. At the same time as it supplied these opportunities, the University itself was a site in which these changes were played out and where workers were aware of the pressures in their own lives. In particular, the difficult relationship between media as entertainment and media as a platform for educational content demonstrates the tension between adaptation and creativity as value‐laden descriptions of the processes of up‐skilling and meeting market demands. Given that this case study is in Shanghai, a city with an extremely mixed reputation for both creative dynamism and the deadening hand of government power plays, the medias role in the Chinese workforce is an ambivalent one.

Collaborative Methods in Researching City Branding: Studies from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Sydney

This article illustrates and reflects upon the nature of inquiry appropriate to the question of place branding, in particular, world city branding. Disciplinary research traditions including cultural studies, film studies, marketing, and psychology offer conceptual categories and valuable modes of access to this area, and our concern here is to examine whether these compete or converge in forming understanding. Noting both the benefits and challenges of working across quite different paradigms of thought, vocabulary, and expected outcome, we discuss the possibilities of mutual shaping or influence in interdisciplinary inquiry. Acknowledging issues in establishing a working and meaningful discursive field across disciplinary boundaries, interests, and methodological habits, we illustrate, using a range of qualitative, projective, and quantitative methods, the collection, evaluation, and analysis of primary and secondary data in a current project. This looks at the major Pacific Rim cities of Sydney, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and particular issues of their brand identity. While all three cities compete on the world stage for events, tourists, and investment, they also are at the center of distinct film traditions, and have been rendered variously in popular imagination. We examine the representation of the city in the mind of some of its publics, and the relation of this to the requirements of branding. We find common ground in critical categories including narrative, everyday life, and color, and view these as a plexus from which various discipline-focused inquiries may proceed. We also discuss how central notions of identity, character, and representation are conceptualized differently within disciplines, and note implications for place-branding theory. We conclude that greater cross-disciplinarity is required for appropriate understanding, and that both tourism marketing and cultural (especially film) studies can learn from each other.

Little Friends: Children and Creative Consumption in the People’s Republic of China

The production and distribution of media content are an increasingly important part of the move to diversify and internationalize China’s economy, although changes have been managed so as to maintain central control over the political sphere. This article argues that children are exemplary consumers in an internationalized environment. They retain and reiterate a sense of local and national identity, but are also fully competent in their relationship to new knowledge in a new world.

Red Aesthetics, Intermediality and the Use of Posters in Chinese Cinema after 1949

Abstract This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptualised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or constructs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s.AbstractThis article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptualised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or constructs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s.

Beijing Time, Black Snow and Magnificent Chaoyang Sociality, Markets and Temporal Shift in China’s Capital

Modern social order is premised on a shared conception of and obedience to a set of defined temporal systems. Time is therefore a powerful tool with which to layer, classify and police the nature of social order. This article explores the relationship between temporality and the social in China’s capital, Beijing. The article draws on observations of Chinese film of the 1990s, the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2011, and the Chaoyang district beautification campaign, to identify how temporal structures and symbols are traded and manipulated in the pursuit of political rectification and harmony. The article is based on an extended review of Michael Dutton’s recent book, Beijing Time, and refers its new observations to the examples and premises in that book, which are in turn informed by Dutton’s other work on policing and street life in China.