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COPYRIGHT 2004 The Institute Inc.
Green Lake Tea
One day during the fall of 2003, I was sitting near Green Lake, at a venue where months later I wrote much of this article. I was on the second floor of a Kunming tea house, busy with the sorts of activities that often occupy anthropologists during early stages of a new field project. I was writing up interview notes, making journal entries, and phoning people who might help move my research along. For years now, this tea house has been one of my favorites in Kunming, the capital of China's southwestern Yunnan province. It sits inside Kunming's Green Lake Park, the former home of Yunnan's provincial library and today a hub of seemingly all things ideally urban: planned gardens, paddle boat rides, and finely designed stone walkways for recreation, romantic walks, and views through foliage of the surrounding high-rise buildings.
At first, on that afternoon, I paid little attention to the fact that the college-age couple sitting next to me at the tea house was smoking. I was in Kunming, after all, a city that for years has been referred to often as China's Tobacco Kingdom. Over the years, as I have conducted research in cities like Kunming, I have learned to live with second-hand smoke, wishing it was not there, trying to delimit my exposure, but ultimately resolving myself to its frequent inevitability.
If anything about the smoke wafting my way that afternoon caught my attention initially, it was the fact that much of it was being produced by the young woman. Smoking among women has long been relatively rare in much of China, and still remains noticeably uncommon in Kunming. (1) Indeed, unlike her hard-puffing partner, the young woman at the table next to me came across as quite a newcomer to smoking, awkwardly manipulating her cigarettes, rarely joining one to her lips, and refraining from noticeable inhalation.
As minutes past, what struck me most about this young couple, though, was less their cigarette use and instead the reflective, languid expressions on the man's face. Whenever I happened to look his way, he seemed to be staring glumly, at times tearfully, into his hands or his partner's eyes. What dilemma could be so distressing him? I wondered. A bump in the road of a freshly forming romantic relationship? A business, educational, or kinship calamity?
By four o'clock, my tasks were complete and I was readying to leave. As I stretched and looked up, my line of vision rose past the couple and through their swirling smoke and the fumes rising from two men who had just occupied a table further beyond, and who were deeply involved in the distinctively male Chinese custom of cigarette exchange. I could only chuckle. How had I not registered earlier this familiar piece of public media hanging over everyone's head, a piece of media seemingly as fraught with contradiction located here in this tea house as the young man across from me was fraught with distress? There, a short distance from me, just beyond where the newly arrived men sat, was a bright white, red, and black sign, prominently displaying a circle with a line through it. At the bottom, the sign stated Jinzhi Xiyan (Smoking is Prohibited).
Abiding Questions of Biopolitics
Regulatory regimes of risk reduction, such as efforts to control tobacco, have been expanding recently in many locales, China included. But these regimes have not been expanding everywhere nor with the same intensity from place to place. Emergent forms of biopolitics, like transnatonal capital today, are selective. They skip around and take noticeable root in some places while skirting others. One setting inside and outside of China where public health efforts at reducing risk have long found footing and thereby often helped define is the city (Dierig et al. 2003). For years, cities have been springboards and magnets for new forms of risk-reduction efforts by health activists. And such efforts have been fundamental for the conceptual and practical framing of cities and their denizens as either generating unique health risks or as centers for sanitary certainty; medical progress, and thus juxtaposed to an untamed, unwashed, underdeveloped, rural periphery.
Yet, if health risks have been important for defining the urban as modern, and vice versa, this raises a set of analytical and substantive questions. First, an analytical problem: How should researchers investigate the relationship between risk and modernity in terms of being urban? By what analytical means should one explore how risk-reduction efforts of public health (as those efforts become instantiated through and as the modern) shape everyday experiences of city life for men and women?
Like tobacco consumption, tobacco control is not a new phenomenon for cities, whether in China or elsewhere. For centuries in many parts of the world there have been people using tobacco and there have been interventions to control that use. But, as with its use, tobacco's control has undergone highly visible transformations of scope and intensity in numerous locales over the last two decades, much of it springing forth in cities. In part, these transformations stem from the ways that the cigarette, more so than almost any other "hazard" in our current era, has been positioned as a bete noire of global risk-reduction efforts.
This brings us to a substantive problem of abiding importance for policymakers and academics alike. In cities, how are rapidly expanding regulatory initiatives of risk reduction like those having to do with cigarettes (quickly shifting sea changes in the mixing of governance, public health, and embodiment) understood and framed by local actors who are not simply "culturally embedded," so to speak, but who are enmeshed in distinctive sociopolitical assemblages marked heavily by state institutions, political economics, forms of desire, and discourses pertaining to class, residency, and gender?
In this paper, I explore these broad analytical and substantive questions vis-a-vis male urban subjectivity by simultaneously interrogating two issues: risk society theory's relevance to and media's involvement with the contemporary regulatory regime of tobacco control in one Chinese city.
Risk Considered
In the last few years, several scholars have examined the rising prominence of tobacco control in various locales as being emblematic of risk's new roles in the making of modernity (Denscombe 2001; O'Malley 1996). These scholars assert that tobacco control is well understood in terms of the most widely circulating sociological framework for analyzing risk, what the theorist Urlick Beck (1992) has come to call risk society (also see Giddens 1994). Rather than arguing for either the broad scale applicability of a risk society framework or its outright mismatch, I agitate for a different, more context-specific, gender-oriented tack here. Inasmuch as this article explores the relevance of Beck's risk society theory to China, the pages that follow are designed to assess how such theory resonates with various sociopolitical specificities that are producing distinctive effects at the level of media production and male experience. I argue that tobacco media in Kunming during recent years has been, at once, part of and a springboard for a unique form of reflexivity, wherein discursive interactions among risk, urbanism, and sociopolitical assemblages have been shaping an emergent type of fraught male identity.
According to Beck (1992, 1999), major shifts have been underway in recent decades across much of the world in the ordering of certainty and uncertainty, and these shifts mark a movement to a new age of modernity, one dominated not just by risk but by representations of risk, both of which increasingly defy easy calculation and management. These risks come in numerous stripes, everything from environmental problems of water and air, toxins in food and consumer products, and terrorism, to cancer, infectious disease, and computer viruses (Beck 2002). Beck's paradigmatic example is the nuclear accident (see also Petryna 2002). Risks are not just more significant in magnitude and more deterritorialized than in previous epochs, Beck says, but their causation and controllability today is understood to be quite different from what was the case in the past. Owing to a host of sociopolitico-technological processes now underway (e.g., the spiraling sense that science [the hallmark of modernity] may no longer just enhance but so too inadvertently endanger wellbeing; globalization's reputed erosion of nation-state authority; the surge in actuarial-based goods and services; and the proliferation of public discord among experts on how best to avoid any specific danger) large-scale risks are increasing and an earlier modernist notion that risks may be controlled is being eclipsed gradually by a new outlook that risk is something we must all live with and accommodate.
Mass media plays particularly pivotal roles in this transition, what Beck has phrased as the transition from a "first" (i.e., early) to a "second" (i.e., late) stage of modernity (1995, 1999). By increasingly trafficking in bloody reportage and actuarial statistics about humanmade hazards, mass media fuel not only the expansion of risk awareness but also doubt in former solidarities and science. By reporting on debates among experts on how individuals might manage and reduce risk, mass media encourage the citizen as media judge, in juxtaposition to an erstwhile more passive model of citizen as recipient of super-ordinate directives designed to lead one down a clear path to risk avoidance. Moreover, by incessantly marketing lifestyle options, mass media fuel the notion that the healthy and responsible individual is one capable of exercising rational thought to produce a distinctive biography, to wisely manage the choppy seas of risk and uncertainty and produce a unique life form.
Thus a key feature of all these transformations, Beck argues, is a fundamental change in notions of self. Dovetailing with other processes of late modernity, most notably those associated with globalization, risk proliferation comes to intensify expectations of self conduct. The combined force of risk and globalization corrodes traditional, communal, and regional solidarities; erstwhile bonds of class, family and nation are weakened....
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