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Drinking Games, Karaoke Songs, and "Yangge" Dances: Youth Cultural Production in RuralChinaAuthor(s): Adam Yuet ChauSource: Ethnology, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Spring, 2006), pp. 161-172Published by: University of Pittsburgh- Of the Commonwealth System of Higher EducationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4617572Accessed: 24/04/2010 06:23

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DRINKING GAMES, KARAOKE SONGS, AND YANGGE DANCES: YOUTH CULTURAL

PRODUCTION IN RURAL CHINA'

Adam Yuet Chau University of London

This article examines the different ways youth in rural Shaanbei, northcentral China participate in cultural production. It explores the media through which young people express themselves and the roles that social institutions (temples, schools, villages, households), modern technologies (video compact discs), and translocal/transnational mass media (satellite and cable TV) play in enabling youth to assert their presence as cultural beings and producers. Shaanbei youth do not choose between modern forms of entertainment (karaoke songs) or traditional forms (playing drinking games), or between institutionally organized activities and those self-initiated to express themselves. (Rural Chinese youth, cultural production, temple festivals, drinking games)

Anthropologists have a long-standing interest in studying the socialization of children and processes of enculturation cross-culturally, yet youth culture has largely remained the preserve of sociologists and specialists of popular culture. The study of Western youth culture has its roots in studies of youth social and cultural movements in the 1960s and 1970s: the Hippies, the anti-war protests, Punks, Beatles fans, etc. (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; Skelton and Valentine 1998). Youth culture in the West seems to be predicated on a self- conscious, relatively coherent set of mental attitudes and behavioral patterns, often dubbed subcultural or counter-cultural. The most important characteristics of Western urban youth culture are the degree of expressivity (e.g., It's "loud"!) in terms of music, fashion, hairstyle, and manners, and the effort to counter what is perceived to be adult stiffness and conservatism. Though having originated in the West, analytical approaches for studying Western urban youth movements seem to be easily transferable to the Chinese urban context, with the May Fourth Movement and subsequent student culture as prime examples of a self-conscious Chinese urban youth culture. In recent years, the import of rock 'n' roll, disco, hip hop, and rave parties further consolidated and expanded an urban youth style distinct from adult and other cultural productions (Farrer 2002; Moore 2005).2

One might think that because rural China is portrayed in the media as being impoverished in things cultural (wenhuapinkun),3 its youth lack the opportunity to have or produce culture. But this depends on where in rural China one looks. In certain parts of rural China, some forms of metropolitan youth culture are emerging since urban cultural forms are rapidly penetrating rural areas, especially

161 ETHNOLOGY vol. 45 no.2, Spring 2006, pp. 161-172. ETHNOLOGY, c/o Department of Anthropology, The University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260 USA Copyright O 2007 The University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved.

162 ETHNOLOGY

along the coast and the peripheries of large cities. In a village near a major urban center (Heilongjiang in northeastern China), Yan (1999) found the local rural youth culture largely derivative of urban popular culture in terms of taste and activities (e.g., billiards, music cassette tapes, printed T-shirts). In Shaanbei, many aspects of youth culture are also drawn from metropolitan pop culture. Although the more education a Shaanbei rural youth receives the more he or she is alienated from village culture and peasant knowledge, the attractiveness of traditional forms of cultural production persists with young people, especially in places like Shaanbei, where such forms of cultural production are still vibrant and popular. Yan (1999) included in his study rural youth's increased consumerism and materialism, increasing premarital sex, the assertion of individual rights and independence, resistance to parents and local state authorities, and a tendency to try new ways of life such as working in the city or traveling.

As the focus of this article is on youth cultural production, other aspects of youth life are de-emphasized. Cultural production here refers to the ensemble of mostly expressive cultural activities, and not instrumental activities such as agriculture, employment, and trade. Expressive culture also includes the consumption of cultural products, such as karaoke songs and the necessary accompanying equipment. Rural youth may be understood to be those who live in villages and market towns, and who have agricultural household registration (nongye hukou). Excluded are youth with nonagricultural household registration (feinongye hukou), and those who reside in the prefecture capitals (i.e., Yan'an and Yulin) and county capitals (xiancheng). Given the large-scale regional rural- to-urban migration of the past two decades, many rural youth have found their way to Shaanbei's urban areas or even beyond Shaanbei as temporary workers. There are also many who go to secondary school in urban areas and thus are temporary urban residents, but are included in this study as they still hold agricultural household registration. (These almost invariably return to their villages during winter and summer vacations, or more frequently.)

THREE PATHS TO ADULTHOOD

Shaanbei youth face three paths of socialization into adulthood. Which path one takes has immense implications for the individual's life orientation, worldview, and the role he or she plays in youth cultural production.

Of the three paths of socialization into adulthood, the most common is to learn how to farm and become a peasant. Most young men and women begin full- time farming after having completed primary school or junior high school. Since Shaanbei people refer to farming as shouku (bearing hardship or burden), it is the least desired. The overwhelming majority of Shaanbei youth take this path,

YOUTH CULTURE IN RURAL CHINA 163

especially those living in remote villages far removed from towns and county capitals. Their worldview overlaps with that of their elders. Some of them might enjoy the hard but uncomplicated life in the village, but most simply are resigned to accepting what fate has allotted them. While more and more rural men cannot afford to marry as the brideprice has skyrocketed, young women might be able to improve their lives by marrying and moving out of remote villages into the towns. These rural youth might be functionally literate thanks to a few years of formal schooling, and they might have developed a taste for urban cultural forms such as karaoke and pop music, but their life orientation is towards their village and agricultural production.

The second path to adulthood is to avoid farming and run one's own business, or work at jobs such as in restaurants, stores, and inns, or become a migrant worker (mingong) or domestic helper in the cities. As the Maoist planned economy abated and petty capitalist opportunities expanded in the past two decades (Gates 1996), rural youth are increasingly taking this path. Shaanbei, however, is not known for sending migrant workers to the big cities and coastal areas, nor do many of its youth have the capital, skills, and connections necessary to open their own businesses. Therefore, most sell their labor to the many private enterprises springing up all over Shaanbei-restaurants, inns, stores, factories, mechanic shops, and even coal mines and oil drilling companies. Many farm during farming season and hire themselves out during agricultural slack times. Some work in businesses (mostly in the market towns) owned by their parents, relatives, or co-villagers. Their cultural taste lies somewhere between folk and metropolitan.

The third path of socialization is to receive enough schooling to be eligible for a state job (gongzuo). Graduates of universities and some vocational schools (zhongzhuan)4 are theoretically eligible for state jobs. However, because of the lack of state jobs, the graduates are encouraged to find their own employment. If they cannot find any jobs, they become the "youth waiting for employment" (daiye qingnian). Because the wait is often indefinite, some join the army, as all demobilized soldiers are eligible for state jobs. Even then, the wait for an acceptable job can be long and unnerving. In sum, the state job path requires academic excellence, perseverance, monetary investment, connections, the not uncommon bribery, and a lot of good luck.

The overwhelming majority of young people who get state jobs are relatives of those who have state jobs. Most Shaanbei youth who set out to get a state job do not succeed. The small percentage of those who do succeed end up working in government offices, or state work units (danwei) such as banks, post offices, factories, shops, hospitals, mines, trading companies, and schools. Most of them in effect leave the village world and enter the world of county or prefectural

164 ETHNOLOGY

capitals, where most of the state jobs are located. If they have switched their household registration and become urban dwellers, they are not included as rural youth in this article. These upwardly mobile youth are much more exposed to school based state ideological indoctrination than their peasant counterparts, and some become members of the Communist Youth League (gongqingtuan) and the Communist Party. Whether or not they get a state job, youth who spend much of their formative years socializing with schoolmates in urban settings adopt a more urban-oriented worldview and partake much more in the consumption of mass mediated youth culture, such as Hong Kong films and popular music on tapes or VCDs.5

The status structure and the three socialization paths mentioned previously are not new in China. They existed in late imperial and Republican times in the figures of the peasant, the petty capitalist or merchant, and the scholar-official. This long-standing structure was replaced temporarily during the peak Socialist period (1950s to early 1980s). Because the household registration system made rural-urban migration and career advancement almost impossible, rural youth during the peak Socialist decades had to stay in their birthplaces and work in the fields, even if they were earning work points and working for the collective rather than farming like traditional peasants. At that time, no private enterprises were allowed, as hiring workers would have been considered exploitative and criminal. Few rural youth could compete with urban youth for the much sought privileged positions of state employment, especially because educational opportunities in the countryside were poor. It is necessary to emphasize that today unemployment is common for Shaanbei rural youth, especially for those who still have official rural residence but whose parents have lost their land by having moved to the towns. Many young people are unemployed after they graduate from school. When asked what they were doing every day, a common response was, "Just staying at home doing nothing" ('iali shengzhe).

SITES OF YOUTH ACTIVITIES AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION

The key factors affecting Shaanbei rural youth's ability to engage in cultural production are commodification, cash, and mobility. Commodification today in Shaanbei is common but far less elaborate than that in the cities because the range of commodities available locally is limited. Most consumer goods in market towns are utilitarian; i.e., food, clothing, kitchenware, farming tools, etc. Shaanbei youth have to make a long trip to the county capital or the prefectural city to buy books, magazines, music tapes, VCDs, or to go to a dance hall or a video parlor.

YOUTH CULTURE IN RURAL CHINA 165

As shichanghua (marketization) increased in China during the past two decades, Shaanbei has become a thoroughly cash-based economy. Cash is needed to buy most things other than the food one produces, but a peasant household's budget is tight and most parents do not want to spend monies they need to save for what they consider priorities, such as the children's weddings. Therefore, unless they or their parents are wage laborers or petty merchants (getihu), most Shaanbei youth have access to far less cash than that available to their metropolitan peers.

Travel in Shaanbei is difficult because of its loess hills and valleys, and transportation from villages to market towns, county capitals, and prefectural cities is time-consuming and often costly. The terrain is too demanding and distances too long for bicycles. Most youth have to pay to take a bus or minibus, or hitch a ride from an adult villager on a motorcycle or tractor to "go to town." Few can afford to own a motorcycle, but those who have learned how to ride will borrow one from an uncle or a friend whenever they have the opportunity to go for a joy ride.

Despite the relative lack of youth cultural venues, cash, and the limitations on their mobility, Shaanbei youth manage to participate in many forms of youth cultural production. Urban Chinese youth cultural activities include attending rock or classical music concerts, going to karaoke boxes or internet cafes, using slang, shouting slogans during political protests, hanging out in bars and caf6s, visiting art exhibitions and culture salons, going to the movies, etc. Shaanbei youth cultural activities include hanging out on market days, going to temple festivals, participating in dance and drum troupes, singing karaoke songs at home or at night markets, rambling about, playing drinking games in restaurants or at banquets, etc. Unlike their urban compatriots, Shaanbei youth do not have their own social spaces but must share different kinds of space, such as temple grounds, markets, or banquets, with people of all ages and try to use these sites differently from the others. These constraints have forced them to make do with what are available to have fun (honghuo; lit., red and fiery).

The Village and the Peasant Household

Collective life under the communes during the peak Socialist period was an important locus where youth culture was produced with group singing and dancing, propaganda troupes, political study sessions, militia training, women's group activities, etc. (Blake 1979; Yan 1999). For a while, the field and the threshing ground were important sites of youth activities where performances were staged, the sexes mixed, and revolutionary fervor aroused. But ever since the communes, brigades, and teams were disbanded in the early 1980s, these

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kinds of collective and organized youth cultural activities ceased. In some rural areas collective life has almost disappeared entirely (Yan 2003).

The peasant household includes members of different ages and generations who live and work together. The head of the household, usually the father, has the most authority. Because older people do not go out as often as younger ones, grandfather and grandmother often make the home a place for visits of friends and neighbors for casual chit-chat or card or mahjong playing. But the peasant household is not conducive to youth activities. With smaller children playing games, running about, or crying, youngsters who want to have their own space find themselves competing with other family members for the same space. Since family members often demand time and energy from youth who are present, the latter would rather go out than stay at home if they want to have fun.

Neither the peasant household nor the village play any significant role in enabling youth cultural production in contemporary Shaanbei, even though they do sometimes provide the settings for some youth activities-temple festivals, for example, or communal festivities, such as funeral and wedding banquets.

Temples and Temple Festivals

In the past two decades, popular religion in Shaanbei has enjoyed a revitalization (Chau 2006). Temples have been rebuilt and festivals honoring the deities are ubiquitous. Temple festivals have spurred the resurgence of regional operas and yangge dances (a traditional peasant form of entertainment). In fact, temples have become the motor of folk cultural production in Shaanbei. The leaders of temple associations are usually men in their 50s and 60s who are village activists. Youth are not able to be leaders in temple associations because they are too inexperienced, but temples and temple festivals provide the settings for certain forms of youth cultural production.

Temple festivals typically last three to four days. In addition to the opera performances, larger temple festivals attract many itinerant merchants, song and dance troupes (gewutuan), circus performers, billiard tents, freak shows (e.g., singing and dancing dwarfs and three-limbed babies in formaldehyde-filled jars), video rooms, games, gambling circles (illegal but often tolerated by local police), and countless food stalls and watermelon stands. In the spring and summer months and during the first month of the lunar year, literally thousands of temple festivals take place across the Shaanbei landscape. Young people relish the excitement of temple festivals, as groups of them stream through the crowds. It is also increasingly common to meet one's future spouse at one of the temple festivals.

YOUTH CULTURE IN RURAL CHINA 167

Every year in the first half of the first lunar month, each temple association organizes a yangge troupe to "visit door by door" (yanmenzi) around the villages in the vicinity of the temple to greet the villagers and to collect donations for the temple. This is a traditional north China village activity. Village men, some dressed as women, form troupes ranging in size from a dozen people to over a hundred. They dance with trumpets, drums, gongs, and other instruments. Today's yangge troupes often have women participants, a legacy of Maoist mixed-gender revolutionary mobilization strategies. The same yangge troupe would also be mobilized to perform at the temple festival honoring the deity's birthday and other important community events. Seeking excitement, fun, and camaraderie, many young people join yangge troupes organized by the temple associations. This mirrors similar development in Taiwan, where teenage boys, especially secondary school dropouts, join amateur or professional dance troupes to perform at the increasingly popular religious festivals (Boretz 1996; Sutton 2003).

Schools

Because of the success of mass education in Shaanbei in the past few decades, schools have become the most important institutional site for molding the youth. Most of the time the students have to listen to their teachers tell them what they can and cannot do. The schools try to channel youth energy into politically and ideologically useful mass activities; e.g., parades at national holidays (May 1st International Labor Day, October 1 st National Day, etc.). These and other cultural activities often constitute an important part of the students' extracurricular lives and are mostly not voluntary. Students have to spend many hours rehearsing for school performances. However, because of the opportunities to meet and mix with a large number of schoolmates and to have fun in a large group, many school youth enjoy these school activities. Sports meets are also activities where official ideologies of "sound bodies" incorporate the youth penchant for fun, competitive striving, and mixed-gender frolicking.

By attending school, Shaanbei youth are both enabled and constrained by the institution through which they produce culture. The schools' manifest function is to train students to advance through primary, junior high, and high school grades to the university, although the final destination is unreachable for the overwhelming majority of the students. Ideologically unchallenged, schools are intended to impart learning, education, literacy, and knowledge-in a word, civilization, or Culture with a capital "C." Though an important part of school life, the production of small-"c" culture is only supplemental to the schools' function as a producer of Cultured Youth (despite the fact that many peasant

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parents wish that their children can at least learn how to sing a few songs at school and be able to write the family's own New Year's couplets).

Almost all Shaanbei schools stage large-scale yangge performances on different festive occasions. Because it had been adopted by the Red Army as a useful revolutionary form (hence sanctified), this rustic dance has been a cultural idiom in schools. (Sometimes the temple and the school merge, as some private schools are funded and operated by temples.) Many schools also send their yangge dance troupes to perform at temple festivals, uniting two very different realms of cultural production. Ironically, the yangge steps the youth have learned at school combine with those they learn at the temple to re-enforce a more rustic body habitus and identity.

Translocal/Mass Youth Culture

Translocal cultural flows bring urban youth cultural tastes, such as popular songs and movies on videos, to rural young people. Unlike organized youth activities, such as those of schools, young people themselves initiate the consumption of these cultural products, which are stimulated and mediated by mass media technologies (Schein 2000:262-67; Zhongguo qingshaonian yanjiu zhongxin 2000:228-50). Despite its relative poverty as compared with coastal regions, Shaanbei of the late 1990s was flooded with cultural products, most notably programs received through cable and satellite television and a prodigious amount and variety of pirated copies of cassette music tapes and VCDs of karaoke and movies. Shaanbei youth of today know many pop songs by heart and they are among the first in the village to buy a VCD karaoke machine (usually as part of the wedding furnishings package). Some of the karaoke videos must have astonished older villagers: as the lyrics of the songs flashed across the bottom of the screen, images unrelated to the content of the songs served as background, which were often bikini-clad young women sun-bathing or gyrating seductively to the music.

The dissemination points of translocal metropolitan youth culture are located in the cities and larger towns. Rural youth go there to buy tapes, rent VCDs, go to the dance halls, watch movies in privately operated movie booths, sing karaoke songs, play billiards, buy fashionable clothes, hang out in the streets, drink, eat, and meet other youth. A few also on occasion engage in group fights or, if they have the money and courage, visit sing-dance girls or prostitutes in the ubiquitous pleasure joints that dot the more urbanized areas of Shaanbei.6 One often sees groups of rural young men, distinguishable by their less sophisticated dress, gather at street corners, leaning against their motorcycles, or walking around town, arms around each other's shoulders. There are also female groups, since

YOUTH CULTURE IN RURAL CHINA 169

many rural young women work in the county seats and larger towns, live in factory dormitories, and emerge in the evenings to relax and seek fun. In the towns, rural young women and men have opportunities to meet, unseen by their elders.

Rambling

Chuan (lit., to string together) is the Shaanbei word for going about from place to place. The most common forms are calling on one's neighbors, relatives, and friends at their homes, visiting the market on market days, going to temple festivals or to town, and for those with a little extra money, going farther away, as to a famous temple. Few Shaanbei rural youth have the resources to travel far from home. Larger cities like Xi'an (provincial capital of Shaanxi), Taiyuan (provincial capital of Shanxi), and Baotou (in Inner Mongolia) are all at least ten hours away by bus and expensive to visit unless one has relatives or friends to stay with. Those who join labor crews to work on road and construction projects have the opportunity to travel to faraway places (even to coastal cities or Beijing), but most stay close to their village and ramble within a limited distance, despite the fact that many of them are extremely curious about distant places.

Spring and summer are temple festival times, and sometimes festivals take place on the same days. On these occasions rural youth may hop from one temple festival to another, preferably by motorcycle, but also using buses, minibuses, trucks, and even tractors.

Finger-Guessing Drinking Games

The folk cultural elements in Shaanbei youth culture also include finger- guessing drinking games, which are mostly played by men. Older men tend to be savvier at these games from decades of practice. There are a few kinds of drinking games. The most common game is huaquan (lit., swinging the fists). This game is played by men in pairs. Both simultaneously swing out their right hands with varying numbers of fingers and shout out a number which each thinks will be the total number of fingers displayed by both men. The one who guesses correctly wins and the loser has to drink a cup of hard liquor or a glass of beer. Drinking games are most commonly found at marriage engagements, weddings, or funeral banquets, but also occur in restaurants and homes. Better players often utter idiomatic expressions to go with the numbers, which makes playing the game more pleasurable. Playing drinking games is a more important social skill for Shaanbei men than smoking and exchanging cigarettes: one can exchange cigarettes but never play drinking games with strangers. Being good at swinging

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the fist is a sign of cultural competence and mastery of social interaction-it has to be played with good humor. It is also one of the most important means of fostering friendship among male peers, as one drinks and plays this game with partners of the same generation (see Shang 2000).

Many Shaanbei young men play the drinking game with great relish.7 Although an acceptable custom, older villagers get annoyed when these youth drinking parties become increasingly frequent and boisterous. One can interpret this as rural youth's momentary defiance of adult authority through an idiom of adultness. So long as Shaanbei youth treasure this game as a folk tradition, young men's frequent engagement with the game indicates a sort of peasant but proud attitude (Kipnis 1995; also Bell 1987).

CONCLUSIONS

Rural Shaanbei youth culture consists of cultural productions that are institutionally organized and those that are individually enabled, and Shaanbei youth find satisfaction participating in both. Institutions involved in youth culture include schools and temples, which mobilize youth to participate in parades or dance troupes. Individually enabled cultural activities include singing karaoke, rambling about town, and playing drinking games. Rural Shaanbei youth do not have to choose between "modem" and "traditional"-singing karaoke songs or playing finger-guessing drinking games--or between institutionally organized activities and self-initiated small-group activities. Each enables youth expressivity and the assertion of their identities.

The structure of their world both enables and restricts Shaanbei youth's ability and inclination to engage in different kinds of cultural practices. Perhaps because of the difficulty of escaping a peasant livelihood and rural life, many Shaanbei youth are not averse to embracing rustic forms of cultural production. But this is only to view their life chances in negative terms. The genuine and intense ftiun, sociality, and animated physicality enabled by yangge dances, drinking games, and rambling about temple festivals are in fact also desired but rarely realized by urban youth, whose media saturated world offers fewer opportunities for active participation in cultural production.

It is difficult to predict what the future holds for Shaanbei youth culture. As local governments come to realize the economic potential of peasant cultural tourism (i.e., urban tourists consuming rustic culture), the rural forms of Shaanbei youth culture will face the challenge of commodification. On the other hand, translocal and metropolitan influences are bound to penetrate deeper into Shaanbei towns and villages. In 1998, the more educated youth were excitedly talking about getting access to the internet and email, which began to be available

YOUTH CULTURE IN RURAL CHINA 171

in the two prefectural cities, Yan'an and Yulin. Mobile phones were also just being introduced. One thing seems certain, that Shaanbei young men will not stop swinging their fists and guessing the number of fingers anytime soon.

NOTES

1. An early version of this paper was presented at the 2000 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco. I thank my co-panelists for their useful comments. Financial support for different periods of fieldwork between 1995 and 1998 from the Committee on Scholarly Communications with China, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for East Asian Studies of Stanford University, and the China Times Cultural Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. 2. Most Western studies of youth in China have focused on urban youth, and offer few details on cultural production (Gold 1991; Hooper 1985, 1991; Jankowiak 1993). Amongthe few studies on rural youth is Yan (1999, 2003). Some excellent survey reports on youth in China include Zhongguo qingshaonian yanjiu zhongxin (2000). 3. The Chinese word for culture (wenhua) has three meanings. One has the anthropological sense; i.e., the material and symbolic manifestations and behavior of a group of people or a geographical region (e.g., Chinese culture, Cantonese culture). A second refers to literacy and formal education; and a third refers to expressive culture, such as music, dance, and literary productions. "Culture" in this article refers to the third sense of culture. 4. The rate of getting into universities and other institutions ofhigher education is extremely low in Shaanbei, but there are vocational schools that train students in elementary education, nursing, agriculture, forestry, irrigation, accounting and finance, mining, etc. Many junior high school graduates enter these schools, hoping to learn a trade or some specialized skill. 5. A Chinese invention circa 1993, VCD stands for video compact disc and is a simpler and cheaper technology than DVD. Competition between different Chinese manufacturers of VCD players, coupled with the market flooding of cheap, pirated VCDs, caused a veritable media entertainment revolution in China. 6. For references to the flourishing sectors of sex, advertising, and commerce where youthful femininity is commodified in urban China, see Zhang (2001). 7. There is no drinking age in China. Shaanbei men normally begin drinking at banquets as teenagers.

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