“Selling Out” Post Mao: Dance Labor and the Ethics of Fulfillment in Reform Era China

Abstract

As the papers in this volume show, any exploration of the individual in China must attend critically to the notion of the individual as a conceptual analytic. In the context of the Reform Era (1976 to the present), experiences and understandings of the individual exist in relation to, and often in contrast with, the ideological and social legacies of Chinese socialism that were developed in the Republican Era (1911–49) and in the Mao Era (1949–76). The individual of Reform Era China thus is genealogically related to the individual of Chinese socialism, and the latter formation persists in the Reform Era as both an historical inheritance and a constructed memory. It is only with a critical understanding of the genealogical and historical development of the individual in Chinese modernity that one can reflect meaningfully on Reform Era China’s rise of the individual in all its particularity as a social and cultural phenomenon.

Research for this paper was funded by the Fulbright Foundation and the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program. For helpful advice and guidance, I am grateful to my advisors at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco, as well as to numerous colleagues who gave feedback on earlier drafts of this work, including the volume editor Andrew Kipnis and many of the other contributors to this volume. The Australian National University made it possible for this volume to come into existence through its generous support of a China Signature conference held in Canberra in 2010. Finally, I would like to express deep gratitude to all of the dancers, artists, and researchers in China who contributed their experiences and insights to this research, and to the Beijing Dance Academy for serving as my institutional home in China.