EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Sociology & Anthropology 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 182 Messner Angelika C. (Kiel University) Research among Chinese Elderly in Urban Contexts Key words: aging people, chronic and emotion related diseases, emotion and body practices, new directions of the study of subjectivity As life expectancy increased from approximately 35 years in the 1950ies towards 75, 5 years in the 21th century, the biological lives of Chinese people currently change rapidly. Growing numbers of chronic diseases (such as Senile Dementia, Parkinson and Alzheimer) and of suicide among Chinese elderly that seem to correlate with an increase of anxiety and depression among them (Bupa, 2010) foster new neces- sities in public health and professional care for old and very old people. Within this context, the Chinese government financially and mentally supports (traditional) Chinese medical practice. An increasing number of (aging) people in urban environments, before, besides or after consulting Western medical authorities, seek the expertise of Chinese medical experts. This being the background of my fieldwork in five different medical spaces (zhongyi menzhenbu 中医门诊部 ) conducted in Hangzhou (June 2013, September and October 2014 and September and October 2015), I sought to explore the particular subjective ways of being of aging people in current urban environments. In order to avoid the fallacies of argumentative and narrative discourses I obtained from the conventional method of questionnaire and focused instead on the concrete “doings” of emotions in a performative sense, on gestures, on the concrete bodily ways people manifest and express their sufferings and needs. With this specific attention for the bodily practices and the less notice on what people verbally “say”, I seek to elaborate new ways to engage particularities of emotion, cognition, action and engagement in order to provide new directions in the study of subjectivity in present day China. Morris Carwyn (London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE)) Controlling the Sounds of the Underground: Cultural Crackdowns through Everyday Policing in China Key words: underground music; sub/counter-cultural movements; China state; public protest; drugs This paper explores the interactions between the Chinese state and Chinese underground musicians, focusing on interactions between the Ministry of Culture, the Public Security Bureau and the musicians. Underground music and related underground sub- and counter-cultural movements have been long involved in encounters with the state. Perhaps most famously the hippie protests to the VietnamWar in the U.S., and punk republicanism in the U.K., through The Sex Pistols. In China, contemporary underground musicians have been using music as a vehicle for political discourse, explicitly and through metaphor, since the late 1980s. But they live and perform in a state of precarity, negotiating between what is and is not acceptable musically and in everyday life under the cultural controls of the state. They engage with the state through two of its biggest bureaus: The Ministry of Culture and the Public Security Bureau. Conflict with the Ministry of Culture can include music being banned online and a refusal to issue albums officially. In a contemporary cultural scene that focuses more online than offline for access, this leads to counter-cultural moments vanishing. Interactions with the Public Security Bureau can be less clearly about the music. Drug raids targeting musicians are common and very selective, with instances of Chinese musicians arrested and non-Chinese musicians ignored. Through these two departments, musicians engage with the Chinese state in a variety of ways, leading to new methods of subversion, but ever stricter control. Nauta Arjen (University of Amsterdam) Appropriating Reality Television: Hunan TV and Creative Resistance Key words: governmentality, reality TV, grassroots appropriation, resistance, state power My research seeks to address the surge of reality-based entertainment television within strategies of governance in China, focusing on the case of Hunan Satellite TV. Reality TV engages with the cul-