In the past, people didn’t dance outdoors. There was no time to dance! Back then, we attended meetings all the time. It was a meeting economy. Now we have a market economy. People have more time for leisure. Why are so many people dancing in the squares now? Why do we have this plaza culture? Because of social development. Tongren has become more socially developed… In the past, Tongren was an industrial city… [but] they closed the factories. Lots of people got laid-off. Now we have a leisure and tourism city. Now people go to the public squares and exercise. (Mr. Liang, 66, retired truck driver)
In the past, leisure activities were collectively organized up behind the old Department Store. There was a big dirt sports field up there, and a running track. It used to be an airport, from the war with Japan. Now activities are privately organised. Now we do things on our own… They tore down the Department Store and replaced it with a public square. The field, the factories, the old airport up there —everything got torn down… The economy is different now. Now we have a market economy, so there’s leisure time, time for exercise. Nobody exercised in the past. It’s a new thing for us. (Mr. Xiang, 61, retired prison guard)
1Mr. Liang and Mr. Xiang pass the time in the public square in the small city of Tongren in Southwestern China’s Guizhou province. They’re happy to talk about how much better life is now, a bit bemused by the whole conversation. They offer the above reflections in response to my question: Why do people dance in the square? For as we sit in the early evening after dinner —enjoying the cooling air after a hot summer day— the square has been taken over by several groups of dancing middle-aged women. In the group nearest to us, most of the women wear matching red shirts and pleated white skirts. They’re well-organised and their bodies move with rehearsed ease. They’ve arranged themselves in four tidy lines, their movements synchronised to the pulsating beat of a pop tune blaring, with some distortion, from a loudspeaker placed on the ground. Their brows glisten with sweat as they concentrate on the leader in front of the group. Most are smiling or laughing (see Figure 1).
2Mr. Liang and Mr. Xiang’s comments trace a moral tale of sacrifice and redemption in a place where hard work has given way to play, and where an economy of struggle and rationing has given way to one of pleasure and abundance. Understanding this trajectory, in which China’s cities have transformed from socialist centres of production to spaces of leisure and consumption, is what has brought us to this public square to watch, with Mr. Liang and Mr. Xiang, this boisterous evening ritual of public dancing unfold. What we refer to in this paper as “plaza dancing” (guangchangwu 广场舞), has become central to the question of how people inhabit new urban public spaces in China. Our interest in this question has stemmed from the fact that urban China’s transformation from industrial production to leisure consumption has been both narrated and materially enacted with a highly visual form of cultural representation. The transformation has been accompanied, in other words, by an explicit discourse of cities as spaces of culture. The idea of the cultural city has mediated and animated China’s embrace of the city as a space in and of itself and not just a platform for industrialism, as it was understood during the high socialism of the Mao era. The city is no longer regarded as an unavoidable if not unfortunate by-product of the country’s need to industrialise. Modernity is no longer being churned out on the assembly line of industrial production. Instead, it is now produced in the spaces of the city itself (Oakes 2019). And those spaces seem increasingly devoted to leisure and consumption.
3Yet in many of Guizhou’s cities, the modernity and social development praised by Mr. Liang and Mr. Xiang is accompanied by a rural and ethnically themed branding project in which many new public spaces have been ornamented with ethnic motifs and reproductions of agricultural objects like waterwheels and millstones (Oakes 2016). Generically ethnic or traditional-looking facades have also been added to many prominent buildings. The discourse of the cultural city in Guizhou, in short, has materialised in what many residents regard to be a decidedly un-modern way. This has been done, they understand, for the purposes of tourism development. Tourism is, after all, the ultimate form of leisure consumption. It seems like the natural culmination of China’s urban transformation. But it makes for an ambivalent urban modernity.
Figure 1: Plaza dance, Leishan, July 10
© Tim Oakes, 2014
4This ambivalence speaks to broader uncertainties surrounding China’s sense of its modern urban self, uncertainties manifest in popular anxieties over public dancing. While traditional songs and dances of ethnic minorities have now been embraced by local governments in Guizhou as the consumable objects of middle class leisure travel (Kendall 2019), the somewhat low-brow quality of urban public dancing sits more awkwardly with that middle class vision. The high-decibel line-dancing practiced nightly in the public square is not what officials have in mind when touting the “ocean of song and dance” that tourists are sure to find when they visit the province. But Mr. Liang and Mr. Xiang’s wives are performing their version of an urban ritual that occurs nightly throughout China. There is nothing about their dancing that is specific to Guizhou, or that suggests a unique (or ethnic, for that matter) cultural practice. And that is precisely the point. Their dancing, we will argue in this paper, enacts a kind of urban modernity —we call it a vernacular modernity— that is largely indifferent to official efforts to brand their cities as ethnic cultural spaces. Indeed, dancing in the public square —with its amplified pop music and its routines learned from online videos— is a practice that, for many of its participants, reinforces “the urban” as a developed, non-ethnic space of civilised modernity, in explicit contrast to the inherent backwardness of “the rural”.
5We explore this production of vernacular modernity by considering public dance as an embodied production of social space. In the over-coded, hyper-visualised city-as-display that contemporary Chinese urbanism has become, public dancers offer themselves as an alternative, embodied way of displaying the city on their own terms. Even as urban redevelopment has yielded new leisure spaces, China’s shiny new cities have not been built with the intention of producing the prosaic culture of boisterous public dance that has in fact emerged. They have, instead, been built as abstract spaces to look at. Plaza dancing literally messes with the visual tidiness and aural ordering of these spaces. Much of the conflict over dancing as a spatial and sonic practice seems to derive from this fact. In contrast to what some have identified as the middle class aspirations of new urban spaces (Pow 2009; Wu 2010), dance might be considered a “subversive” appropriation of that space, a way of being modern on one’s own terms.
6Yet at the same time, plaza dancers proclaim themselves to be producing a “civilised” city. They are part of the governmental machinery of urban space, engaged in a kind of “civic governmentality” (Roy 2009). Plaza dancing is an important resource in the state’s project of “governing by community” (Bray 2009), part of a broader apparatus of spatial governmentality (Merry 2001) that has been constructed around urban China’s post-socialist transformations. This apparatus includes discourses of quality (suzhi 素质), civility (wenming 文明), and harmony (hexie 和谐), and responsibilisation of the self in terms of healthcare and welfare. Osborn and Rose (1999) have noted that the city has sometimes been viewed by reformers and officials as a sort of “machine” for constructing social tranquillity and happiness (Oakes 2019), and plaza dancers might be understood as the human power fuelling this machine.
7Plaza dancers have consistently insisted on defining for themselves what urban modernity in China is supposed to look, feel, and sound like. If the city is being reconstructed in China today as a visual spectacle of decidedly middle-class orderliness and a “machine” for producing harmony, then plaza dancers are offering themselves as an alternative machine, one that gets in your face (and in your ears). “Look at us!” they proclaim every night. “We are the city!” If they are part of the state’s apparatus for building community and civilising the city, they are participating in this project on their terms and not those of the officials and planners who have sought to guide China’s urbanisation toward more “humane” and “harmonious” outcomes. If the city is a machine of governmentality, its residents have turned it into a dance machine for their own purposes.
8Below, we explore the city as a dance machine in an effort to highlight public dancing less as a subversive or oppositional practice and more as a production of social space that emerges as part of the rhythms of everyday life in the city. While we stress vernacular modernity as an alternative to the abstract space of state urban planning in China, we find that plaza dancers embrace an identity as vanguards of social development and civilisation in contrast to the rural places from which many of them only recently moved and against which they position the city as a beacon of civility and progress.
9Before proceeding to the dance machine, a brief note about the research. The project that brought us into conversation with Mr. Liang and Mr. Xiang was focused on exploring the rapid reconstruction of urban space in several of Guizhou’s small cities, where ethnic theming was the central feature of urban renewal. Research sites included the cities of Tongren, Kaili, and Duyun, and the county town of Leishan, though this paper includes results only from Tongren and Leishan. Tongren is a prefectural-level city with a majority Han Chinese population, with significant minorities of Miao and Tujia. Leishan is a county-level town within the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong autonomous prefecture. The town’s population is mostly Miao. Tim Oakes carried out participant observation in public leisure spaces over repeated visits between the years 2011 to 2014. This was accompanied by a survey of nearly 600 residents and visitors in these spaces, and some 40 extended interviews with both officials and residents, with the assistance of colleagues and students at a local university. Yang Yang joined the team in 2013 and 2014, conducting participant observation and assisting with interviews. The account below draws primarily on fieldwork conducted by Oakes and Yang during 2014.
10Guangchangwu is most literally translated into English as “square dance” because it often takes place in public squares. The translation is unfortunate in that it might suggest connotations, among some English readers, with Western style (and more specifically western United States style) “square dancing”. “Plaza dance” might therefore be a better translation, but guangchangwu can take place anywhere there is enough space: in parks, on sidewalks, underneath highway overpasses or bridges, in playgrounds, between buildings, or even on highways jammed with traffic. It is perhaps for this reason that Huang (2016) translates guangchangwu as “congregational” dance, emphasising its collective, rather than spatial, nature. Yet guangchangwu is fundamentally a spatial practice, that is, a social production of space. Indeed, one of its most important characteristics throughout urban China is its presence in spaces that were never designed or intended for leisure activities (Chen 2010). Thus, while terms like “square dance” or “plaza dance” may suggest a dance that occurs in a space that was built to facilitate such a dance, the opposite is just as often true. That is, guangchangwu is a dance that claims space, and territorialises the urban environment. While “plaza dance” does not capture this territorial quality, we nevertheless use this translation throughout the paper in order to maintain guangchangwu’s association with dancing in a public space.
11In Tongren’s recently renovated Hebing Park, on any given evening, twelve different dance groups congregate, occupying every available inch of open space. Most of these groups meet every evening for a couple hours. They will dance to about 30 different songs: a mix of contemporary pop music, along with some older folk tunes updated or instrumentalised with a danceable beat. The dance groups tend to function like informal clubs, often with a small amount of cash collected each evening to help cover the expense of the sound system. In some cases, dancers wear matching clothes. Most dancers are middle aged women, though a few men participate as well. Some dancers join informally and only occasionally, but most are regulars, coming out every evening. Each group occupies its designated place in the park and remains only within that space; an unwritten rule seemingly recognises the territorial claim of each group. Territorial conflicts do, however, occur sometimes, though we never witnessed any such conflicts ourselves. Most groups have one or several leaders who teach the dances to the rest; almost everyone told us they learned the dances from online videos. They mostly practice conventional line-dances, which are the core of the plaza dance style, but they also do “ballroom dancing” (jiaojiwu 交际舞) and Yangge dances (yanggewu 秧歌舞). Not too long ago, one woman tells us as evidence of their worldliness, they used to dance disco. Perhaps it is also testament to their worldliness that they no longer do.
12Meanwhile, in the public square in Leishan, four different dance groups gather each evening. Many of the dancers here are Miao. Each evening they might do one or two traditional Miao dances. When we ask about ethnic dances, one woman says they did more in the past, “but I prefer the modern dances”. We can barely hear her, though, and she has to shout. The plaza, surrounded by five or six floor buildings on three sides and a hill on the other, is awash in cacophonous sound. Each group has invested in a sound system and, over the years, we witnessed something of a loudspeaker arms-race among the four regular groups. Many of the townspeople we talk to complain about the evening noise; indeed, some of the dancers themselves complain about it, but many others find it exciting and lively (renao 热闹), more like a big city.
13There is a history of public dancing in urban China going back to the Republican era. During the early decades of the 20th century, dancing in nightclubs and bars carried both connotations of modernity and subversion of norms (Stevens 2003). Dancers in Tongren and Leishan often claimed to be doing some version of the Yangge style of folk dance that originated in northern China and became politicised during the early years of the Communist revolution. As with many folk cultural practices, Yangge was banned during the Cultural Revolution and replaced with “loyalty dance” (zhongziwu 忠字舞) in which political devotion to Mao Zedong was enacted through rhythmic movement accompanied by song. In the early years of the reform era, ballroom dancing and disco were embraced for their Western connotations, yet outdoor dancing in public spaces remained limited, perhaps in part due to the association of rhythmic movement in public spaces with the political fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution. Still, the movements and songs of the loyalty dance were engrained in an entire generation. This has suggested to many observers that contemporary plaza dancing represents a revival of China’s socialist collective tradition in response to the increasing privatisation and anonymisation of urban life. One resident told us, “[dancing is part of] China’s collective tradition. This dancing, it’s not a traditional custom, but the Chinese do things collectively, so it makes sense that they like to get together and dance”. A 2014 report in The Guardian drew an explicit connection to the Cultural Revolution, via the revival of “red” songs and dances by the now-disgraced former mayor of Chongqing Bo Xilai (Makinen 2014). The report quotes several dancers, such as Liu Jilu who says, “When I do the dances, it reminds me of my younger years when I was doing similar dances during the Cultural Revolution. I feel the same kind of spirit and emotions”. A similar connection is asserted by Kang Shiwei’s 2017 film Dance on the Square (Guangchangshang de Wudao 广场上的舞蹈). The Hong Kong anthropologist Wang Qianyi (2015) has argued that plaza dancers are the lonely cast-offs of the dying collective economy, and are often portrayed in the media as unfit for modern urban life.
14However, in contrast to the idea that plaza dancing breathes life into the vestiges of the loyalty dance in order to subvert, or at least cope with, the individualism and consumerism of a new era, some view it, instead, as an expression and embrace of China’s shift toward privatisation. Fudan University sociologist Yu Hai (2015) argues that plaza dancing is in fact a product of the emergence of private life in China, due to its voluntary and non-standardised nature. The loyalty dance was neither. But Yu contrasts plaza dancing not with loyalty dance but with “broadcast exercise” (guangbo ticao 广播体操). This was the standardised exercise routine that was broadcast via loudspeaker throughout urban work units during the socialist era (and well into the 1990s in some places). “Broadcast exercise”, Yu argues, was a product of standardised socialist planning, a top-down, national form of exercise. In contrast, plaza dancing is a privatised form of exercise that spontaneously developed among individuals.
15Discussions and debates about plaza dancing in China clearly reflect anxieties about the broader uncertainties of social, cultural, and spatial change in China (Wang 2015). These include anxieties over what China is leaving behind as it erases —through demolition and urban reconstruction— older socialist collective patterns of urban living. At the same time, the low-brow nature of plaza dancing produces anxieties over whether China’s modernisation is genuine. Plaza dancers raise the question for many of China’s urban residents of whether the country can truly claim to have a modern urban culture worthy of its shiny new cities.
16That plaza dancing figures centrally in these anxieties also suggests a gendered dimension to China’s uncertain sense of its modern urban self. Plaza dancers are typically referred to in Chinese as dama, a derogatory term connoting a loud middle-aged woman, typically pudgy and no longer attractive. Wang (2015) contrasts the middle-aged plaza dancing woman with young and sexy women who practice yoga, which has become highly commodified in urban China. Indeed, the relatively low level of consumption associated with plaza dancing is one of its distinguishing characteristics in comparison to other exercise trends like yoga or jogging, both of which encourage the purchase of expensive clothing or club memberships.
17A number of studies have explored the relationship between plaza dancing and the emergence of public space in China (Jayne & Leung 2014; Qian 2019). Zhang (2015) argues that conflicts over plaza dancing (which are primarily complaints about noise and the dancers’ monopolisation of public spaces), reveal how the Chinese public isn’t yet accustomed to the meaning or use of public space. This is because, he argues, China has historically never had truly public spaces. Instead, China has had state or religious spaces that the public gets to use for certain purposes. Today’s urban residents aren’t accustomed to having a sense of ownership over this space, because it is typically supplied by the state or by real estate developers. Plaza dancers, for Zhang, are claiming public space for their own exclusive use, a kind of informal privatisation of public goods.
18Yu (2015) echoes this perspective to a point, noting that the changing spatialities of everyday life in urban China compel residents to negotiate and sort out what constitutes public space in a context where the state remains a powerful arbiter of spatial organisation, but where individualised, privatised, and commodified spaces and practices tend to dominate how people engage with this spatial organisation. But plaza dancing is also, for Yu, a grassroots effort to recollectivise private life. Huang (2016) similarly finds plaza dancers to be forming social collectivities beyond the scope of state control. In this way, plaza dancing is similar to the collectivities that form around individual consumption choices. “People who join dance groups”, she claims, “do so precisely in order to participate in individualised consumer culture on their own terms” (Huang 2016: 227).
19Qian and Lu (2019) similarly argue that plaza dancing is an urban experimentation with publicness, and that it is an active process of urban learning. They call plaza dancing a kind of “vernacular creativity negotiating the transition of urbanism in China toward a society of strangers” (Qian & Lu 2019: 698). Like Yu (2015), they find plaza dancing both collective and individual, a practice that splits the boundary “between the individualisation of society and the urge for (re‐)belonging” (Yu 2015: 696). This interpretation raises questions about how we consider urban public space vis-à-vis the authoritarian state in China. Plaza dancing is viewed by Qian and Lu as an arena in which the urban public practices “being public”, thereby holding at a distance their identities as collective state subjects. Huang (2016: 232) observes that “far from continuing to invest their identities in state-organised social frameworks, many people are in fact joining [dance] groups in order to practice self-management”. Yet can the public spaces of plaza dancing be thought of as non-state spaces? In the next section, a governmentality approach is briefly explored to suggest that the public-state binary implicit in this question is problematic.
20Junxi Qian (2019: 157) has argued that “it is not uncommon for public space in urban China to be mobilised by the state to advance various purposes of governance”. These might include cultivating political loyalty, maintaining social order, or promoting health and happiness. In their study of the eudemonic city under liberal capitalism, Osborne and Rose (1999) maintain that the governmentalised state cultivates the consent of residents by producing community spaces for civic-minded citizens. They explore how European planners and reformers of the late-19th and early-20th centuries came to view the city as a machine for producing certain kinds of citizens. Urban space becomes an effect of calculations, discourses, and practices meant to enhance the health, welfare, and security of the population. In this regard, health and the healthy body emerge as prioritised features of the city as a territorialised effect of government. This “healthy city” is always contrasted with an “other” city of dangerous pleasure. Healthy, civilised pursuits, particularly in leisure time, “are heightened by their proximity to the… opaque, excessive, ungoverned city” (Osborne & Rose 1999: 757).
21Plaza dancing is viewed by many dancers themselves as a way of displaying the health, vibrancy, and civility of the city. Here’s how one organised dance group, called Azalea, introduces itself on the wall of the local community government offices in Leishan:
Tourism development has brought a good day to Leishan. The lives of residents have improved, and so has their individual health. Exercise dancing is an extremely good way for middle aged and elderly people to keep fit. It’s easy to learn. It’s a very good manifestation of our country’s wonderful culture and physical fitness. It also allows the citizens of our town to enjoy the scenic belt, and it gives outsiders who visit a deeper impression of Leishan. Dancing helps build tourism in our county, and helps build Leishan as a provincial-level “civilised county.” It helps open up the creativity of women. It’s an activity of influential women. Azalea promotes dance in order to conform to the times, fully grasp ethnic cultural lifestyle, and attract people to take care of their health, civilisation, and scientific lifestyle.
22Here, dancing is portrayed not only as something performed by influential women for their own self-cultivation, but also as an extension of the tourism economy, allowing residents to be leisure consumers themselves (“enjoy the scenic belt”) and allowing tourists a “deep impression” of a civilised place. Dancing in the plaza is a way of displaying to outsiders the charms of the town. In addition, as Mrs. Lu, the leader of Azalea, told us, dance is a form of civilised modernity that should be imparted on the town’s less civilised and less modern rural counterparts. To that end, the troupe regularly travels throughout the county, dancing in one village after another. Pictures of these civilising expeditions decorate the walls of the neighbourhood community (shequ 社区) offices. Mrs. Lu was particularly happy to report to us that each evening several “farmers” (nongmin 农民) show up to dance with the group in town. These are typically recent migrants from the countryside who have opened businesses or bought apartments in town. Joining her dance troupe was a way for them to acquire some “quality” and learn how to live in the town’s new leisure-consumption environment. In this way, she claimed that her troupe was an active agent of social development.
23Do the practices of Azalea and other plaza dance groups constitute a kind of civic governmentality in urban China? Roy (2009) envisions civic governmentality as:
a spatialised regime that functions through particular mentalities or rationalities. These include an infrastructure of populist mediation; technologies of governing (for example, knowledge production); and norms of self-rule (for example, concepts of civility and civicness) (Roy 2009: 160).
24Certainly Azalea has taken it upon itself to function as some sort of manager of the civic realm, and as a plaza dancing group, it seeks to institute a regime of governing among a population (retired or laid-off middle aged women) that has in some ways been abandoned by China’s post-socialist restructuring and demographic changes. So in some respects, plaza dancing might indeed be producing a kind of governable space in the urban public sphere that aligns with state projects of promoting social order, civility, and the healthy city.
25However, there are several ways that plaza dancing deviates from these state projects. The prosaic and decidedly unsophisticated nature of plaza dancing clashes with the vision of middle class prosperity and refinement that tends to dominate visions of urban modernity in China (Pow 2009; Wu 2010). Related to this, and more specific of plaza dancing in Guizhou, is the way plaza dancing clashes with the staged exoticism and faux rusticity that local governments seek to brand towns and cities with as part of the provincial priorities of ethnic, cultural, and rural tourism. Plaza dancing is also often viewed in popular media as highly disruptive and disorderly, a low-brow form of leisure that lays bare the unsophisticated roots of Chinese culture. Plaza dancing has caused tremendous anxiety online, and on the ground, over the ways it seemingly reveals China to be “not quite” modern enough, or not quite culturally worthy of the sleek new urban landscapes that are increasingly dominating the built environment.
26Mrs. Lu’s faith in Azalea’s capacity to transform rural farmers into urban citizens echoes a broader belief among many of China’s urban planners and officials that the urban built environment has a similar ability to produce certain kinds of subjects. And clearly Mrs. Lu wanted us to view dancing as a civilised activity, rather than something noisy, chaotic, and lacking in quality. Here, we find in Azalea’s self-representation an appeal for others to see middle aged women as agents of modernity, not as anachronisms of the collectivist past. But it is a vernacular modernity that anchors this appeal, not the sleek gentrified sophistication of luxury cars and wine-tasting parties envisioned by real estate developers, urban planners and official discourses of middle-class cultivation. The vernacular modernity performed in the public square every evening is being churned out regardless of the worlding or careerist ambitions of officials; it is part of the rhythmic machinery of the city itself. And it is a modernity that insists on a sharp rural-urban contrast, in which the city still plays a role in “civilising” the countryside.
27Many residents in the small cities of Guizhou —a province with a large portion of ethnic minority groups— articulate an idea of modernity that tends to view urban space as “non-ethnic”, and emphasises the role of the city in “civilising” the countryside. This is particularly noteworthy when one considers that in the province’s small cities and towns, many of the residents are themselves ethnic minorities. Most also have extended family in the nearby countryside. As noted earlier, both Tongren and Leishan had also undergone ethnic branding projects significantly altering the built environment in an effort to make them more attractive for visitors. This was especially the case with Leishan, where ethnically themed facades had been added to almost all the town’s buildings. These projects were roundly dismissed by residents we interviewed as “government matters” that had nothing to do with the daily lives of townspeople. Some added, cynically, that such projects were also meant to enhance the careers of officials, and that the “visitors” for whom the town was put on display were not tourists but higher-ups who would recommend promotions for town mayors. One retired schoolteacher, of the Miao minority, told us that after she moved to Leishan from the countryside in 1958, she fully adopted an urban and non-ethnic identity. This meant that she no longer owned any traditional ethnic clothes and rarely spoke in the Miao language. She said that the ethnic-looking facades reminded her of the “old society” before the revolution. “I don’t really know why they would do this”, she told us. “It was the government’s decision”. Another person noted the irony of a situation in which cities were mimicking the countryside while at the same time rural houses were increasingly resembling those now-passé concrete buildings of the city (this was largely due to rural migrant workers returning their urban-earned remittances to the countryside to support their families). “Now the city looks more like the countryside”, he laughed, musing at the ethnically ornamented buildings around him, “and the countryside looks more like the city!”
28In similar ways, a few others we talked with found the facade projects an embarrassing reinforcement of Guizhou’s “provincial” character and lack of modern urban sophistication. One retired couple told us that they thought the facade project was ridiculous. “The leaders are crazy!” the woman complained:
The buildings don’t look progressive. The town should have modern-looking buildings. The Miao people, they would also like to see modern-looking buildings here. If they want to see old, backward-looking buildings they can go to the villages.
29The wall of their living room was graced with a huge photograph of the Liujiazui skyline in Shanghai. That represented urban modernity to them, and that was what all towns and cities in China should aspire to be. Tall buildings, broad boulevards, pedestrian shopping streets, and open plazas were the features that people most often mentioned to us as typifying a “modern city”. Such spaces should be both clean and lively with plenty of commercial activity and opportunity for shopping.
30Our use of the term “vernacular urban modernity” is meant to signal everyday attitudes in China regarding what a city should look, sound, and feel like. As with this retired couple, those attitudes equate a city with tall buildings, worldly style, popular music, loud noise, and above all development, progress, and newness. The term is offered here as a contrast to elite conceptions of urban planning and design that tend to regard the city as a platform for any number of projects that aim to improve the population, the economy, or the process of governing. More specifically, in Guizhou we use vernacular urban modernity to convey the common, everyday attitudes about urbanism that we encountered which contrasted with the ways urban spaces were in fact being transformed into designed and themed spaces. Here we hue closer to the linguistic definition of the term “vernacular” as a language of ordinary people, rather than the architectural definition focusing on the local styles of ordinary dwellings. This distinction is important since one might consider the ethnic facades that have changed the visual appearance of Leishan and Tongren as a form of vernacular modernism. This is, for instance, how Li Zhang (2010) has used the term, in reference to ethnically-inspired, distinctively local designs in the houses or flats of the new urban middle class. But our focus here is instead on an attitude that make a hard distinction between “the urban” and “the local” or “the rural.” More than anything, vernacular urban modernity —in our approach— signals a commitment to valuing the city as everything the rural is not. It thus marks the ordinary, lay-person’s version of what Brenner (2014) has called “cityism”.
31In addition to a dense skyline of tall buildings, residents speaking in this vernacular of urban modernity identified large open public spaces and wide boulevards as typifying a modern city, where enough space existed for everyone to do whatever they want without getting in someone else’s way. One man commented to us one evening in a crowded public square throbbing with dance music:
Big open spaces make people more civilised! When there’s plenty of space, you don’t have to fight for space, so everyone is polite and well-behaved. It opens their hearts, and improves their quality. I rarely see inappropriate behaviour here in the square.
32Tongren had recently built a significant number of new public spaces throughout the urban area. Most of these were attractively designed but were of relatively modest scale. Some could be called “pocket parks”. For one resident they didn’t count as public plazas at all. “Tongren doesn’t have any plazas”, she said emphatically. Her comment surprised us, so we asked for clarification. “No, really, there are none here,” she said. “The new parks, the new plazas in the town, these are smaller than a county-level square”. She was thinking of those vast empty socialist spaces like Tiananmen Square. That was a proper plaza to her.
33What was important to residents was not themed leisure space but simply leisure space in general. Few residents we interviewed away from the themed public spaces in Tongren and Leishan could recall with any clarity or certainty the various themed elements that had been built into those spaces. The theming was largely invisible to them. And yet they used these spaces all the time. What mattered was not the aesthetic quality of the space, but its quantity and whether there was enough space to accommodate all the demand for plaza dancing among town residents. Echoing Mr. Liang and Mr. Xiang’s reflections, one resident responded to our question about the popularity of plaza dance this way:
[People dance now] because society has opened up, and because there’s a bigger space now. Social opening means more leisure time. There’s time to relax. Before, we were always working so hard, there was no time. Dancing is something that people who have culture learn to do, people with some education.
34Urban plaza dancing was not an expression of ethnic identity or the ethnic exoticism that leaders sought to brand these urban sites with. It was, instead, an embodied and rhythmic production of everyday civicness, and an alternative, vernacular, display of urban modernity. The singing and dancing of village-oriented ethnic tourism was completely irrelevant to the plaza dancing of urban modernity. The song and dance skills that mark ethnic identity failed to qualify rural people for the same kind of modern or civilised status reserved for urban residents. Only the dance machine could achieve that kind of transformation in subjectivity. “It seems like everyone dances now”, said one resident. “Even the farmers. Society has become more developed. Even the farmers have enough confidence to join in this kind of urban lifestyle” (emphasis added). Another resident told us:
I’m very lucky! I have this house to live in, and every night I go out to dance in the plaza. Before, life was really hard! There wasn’t enough to eat. Now, I can go and dance! I go out in the morning to exercise, come back to eat. Then take a nap until 2:00. In the afternoon I go out and dance again! I’ve been dancing like this for the past 5 or 6 years.
35These rhythms of everyday urban life are central to our idea of the city as a dance machine. While the term might suggest a Deleuzian genealogy, we are more interested in conveying the mechanistic qualities of everyday life and the rhythmic nature of those qualities. Much as Osborne and Rose (1999) draw our attention to a diagram of the city as a machine for the production of both vile sensations and healthy living, we view the city in China as a machine that produces public dance. The basis of that production is found in the rhythms of everyday life, and those rhythms are reconstituted through plaza dance. Henri Lefebvre (2004) understood that rhythm begins with the body, and he argued that as people live their everyday rhythms, their struggle with the abstractions of capital and the state, in both time and space, is manifest in the popular appropriation of public space. Kurt Meyer (2008: 158) has extended this idea, arguing that “by making this urban public space the place of strolling around, of encounters, of discussions and negotiations, of intrigue and spectacle, they appropriate it spontaneously”. To this list of activities of appropriation, we might add plaza dance. Dance is part of a rhythmic routine of everyday life for many residents in Tongren and Leishan. That rhythm produces an explosion of sound and movement every evening in public spaces throughout the city. Layered onto those daily rhythms are the coordinated rhythms of the dance itself: lines of eurythmic dancers facing the same direction, producing a harmony of movement, an isorhythm of repetition that collectively produces a social space.
36We contend that the social space produced by this dance machine is of a vernacular nature, a vernacular of urban modernity. But this does not necessarily mean that the dance machine is somehow producing a subversive space that counters the state. Plaza dancers claim a responsibility for the self that comes with social development, the market economy, and urban civility. As Mrs. Lu sought to make clear to us, plaza dancers like the Azalea group know how to use their leisure time wisely, rationally, and even patriotically. Many people we interviewed contrasted plaza dancing with “less healthy” pursuits like playing mah-jong or cards, going to the internet café, or just staying home and watching television. This attitude was reinforced by neighbourhood cadres and planners who told us that a key objective of the city’s efforts to increase outdoor leisure space was to get people out of their apartments. This had the effect of improving the city’s “spirit” and the “quality” of the citizens, because it forced people to interact with each other, improving their communication and overall civility. Local community governments have played a supporting role in organising dance groups for this reason, since dancing is seen as a key ingredient of a moral and harmonious neighbourhood. Retirees associations have also been instrumental in promoting dancing. “Dancing is so good for your health”, commented one resident. “When others see the benefits that it has for their friends, they want to start doing it too”.
37But there is some irony to be found in the argument that dancing is a key ingredient of a moral and harmonious neighbourhood. The noise generated by dancing groups has, in particular, resulted in a significant backlash throughout China. At the time of our fieldwork, the local governments had not yet implemented dancing curfews so that people could sleep at night (many cities throughout China have done this), but there was discussion of this possibility, with the expectation that a curfew was perhaps inevitable. Already curfews were imposed within may gated compounds whose open spaces, surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings, were favourite dancing sites. The acoustics of such compounds meant that all residents participated in the dance whether they wanted to or not. But, as a dance leader within one compound told us, “some people complain, but this place needs to be lively or nobody will want to live here; they’ll just have to put up with it”! A few others mentioned that obsession with plaza dancing has put strains on some marriages in the neighbourhood. Another dance leader had this to say:
Dancing is a good thing; it’s healthy to do some exercise after dinner. But in some cases, with some of my friends, the dancing has led to divorce. Because some women spend so much time dancing; and sometimes they meet other men when they’re dancing. Those divorced women, they drink, they go dancing, they play mah-jong —they’re not appropriate at all!
38This disorderly and even somewhat dangerous quality (“they drink…they’re not appropriate at all”!) of plaza dancing reminds us that it is a practice that makes claims on public space and on the bodies within that space. There have been efforts to apply a more top-down standardised order to plaza dancing, to insure that it remains healthy. In March 2015, 12 official plaza dance routines were announced: these were “nationally unified” and “scientifically crafted” for “positive energy”. They would also help dancers realise China’s “core socialist values”. The reaction online was swift and contemptuous: “It’s so tiring to be a Chinese, when a dance has to demonstrate core socialist values”, a person going by the name of Shanapu wrote on Weibo. “Do we need to demonstrate these when we go to the toilet too”? (Zhao 2016). For the Western press, it was an opportunity to criticise overreaching state control of society, even though the routines were only meant to provide “guidance.” The New York Times equated the standards to state overreach:
That’s ridiculous, said Xiao Kai, 50, taking a break from dancing at an office complex that drew more than 100 women and a smattering of men. “This isn’t a business. Dancing is free and voluntary, so why does the government need to get involved?”… Xinhua said that in the future public dancing would no longer vary from place to place but would become “a nationally unified”, scientifically crafted new activity that brings positive energy to the people (Jacobs 2015).
39But most plaza dancers themselves just shrugged off the official routines as having nothing to do with them. As was noted in another New York Times article, “In the end the effort failed, with most groups refusing to adopt the officially sanctioned routines” (Buckley 2016). Dancers themselves were not opposed to the idea of standardised dances but they found the routines too difficult; the national promoters were looking at dance as exercise, not as fun and relaxation. Indeed, the so-called Prince of Plaza Dance, Wang Guangcheng, who was commissioned by the central government in 2015 to produce the standardised dance routines, owns a fitness studio in Beijing and promotes dance primarily as a form of exercise. Many of the dancers we met joined dance groups as a way to get healthy after illness or disability, but the new standardised moves did not seem to take this into account (Chen 2015). As collective producers of social space, plaza dancers seemed to resist a state model that standardised dance to a different set of rhythms. “The national standards will make everyone bored”, one woman said during a follow-up trip in 2017. “If the government wants to help us, they should find us bigger plazas!”, she added (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Plaza dance, Tongren, July 4
© Tim Oakes, 2014
40Dancing in the plaza is an embodied practice of urban modernity that has very little to do with the official narrative of urban modernity in Guizhou today. State efforts to ethnically brand the urban built environment are studiously ignored by plaza dancers who enact a form of urban modernity that instead conforms to more popular, vernacular notions of what a city should look, feel, and sound like. Plaza dancing offers, in other words, a prosaic conformity to popular notions of urbanity, as opposed to the exotic distinctiveness sought by planners and officials as a means of attracting the attention of tourists and, we should add, higher officials. In its prosaic conformity, plaza dancing embodies a rhythm of urban life that is decidedly ordinary (Robinson 2006). While there is a “civic governmentality” to this ordinariness, in which dancers cultivate the self and a healthy body, while aspiring to dominant narratives of “civilised” and “healthy’ cities”, there is also an inherent disorder that always comes with embodied, performative practice. Osborne and Rose (1999) might call this disorder the unhealthy or dangerous “other” that always animates the moral force of the healthy city. They would argue that the dance machine produces a governmentalised body through which social ordering projects of civility, morality, harmony, and patriotism are (literally) exercised. But the dance machine also produces a vernacular urban modernity which, like urban modernities everywhere perhaps, is animated by its less sophisticated rural other (cf. Dibazar et al. 2013). This vernacular modernity is one in which the city is performed through embodied practice, rather than displayed in the built environment.
41This performance of the city, in turn, tells us something about the emergence of public space in post-reform urban China. As was noted earlier, public space in China is typically conceived as a space provided for the public by the state. Hung (2011: 9) reminds us that public space “never belonged to the populace, nor was it open to the public in the sense that it was free and without control.” Qian (2019: 157) agrees, noting that, “instead of an arena of civic agency external to the state (in the tenor of the Habermasian theory of the Öffentlichkeit), public space in China has always been susceptible to state rationales and agendas of the politico-social elites”. China’s cities are full of these kinds of spaces, where design, theming, branding, and other forms of display produce visual spectacles that seek to inculcate social order. But most of these spaces are full of dancers. What makes them public spaces is less their spatial governmentality and more the way they are being claimed and territorialised by a dancing public. Dancing may be an expression of China’s opening up, as Mr. Liang and Mr. Xiang claimed; it may be an expression of a new consumption-oriented and privatised form of urban citizenship, as argued by Wang (2015) and others; but, in its embodied practice plaza dancing also lays claim upon public space and thereby produces the social space of the city.
A very early version of this paper was first delivered at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting in 2015. Thanks to Louisa Schein for critical comments at that early stage. Thanks to Jun Zhang for helpful discussions about everyday song and dance in China. Research was carried out with a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS 1263589). We also wish to thank Guizhou Minzu University and Professor Wu Xiaoping without whom the fieldwork would have been impossible. Additional assistance was provided by Peng Xiaojuan, Liu Jing, Luo Shaoling, Kang Hongmei, Liu Yulian, He Yan, and Zheng Ao. We also wish to thank four anonymous referees whose insights and close reading of an earlier draft of this paper were extremely helpful.
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