Shanghai Nightlife-Parlors-Nightclubs

 
"Nightlife" bas reemerged in China and Shanghai since the "opening and reform policies" of 1978.

Genres of contemporary Chinese Shanghai nightlife include bars, dance clubs, karaoke clubs and saunas, all of which have been influenced by transnational flows of investments, ideas and people.

Nightlife is an important space for Chinese people and the study of sexual subcultures in Chinese cities. Nightlife is thus an area in which we can study the transnational processes of cultural change in China, while examining the possibilities of individual agency, resistance and creativity within these organizing structures.

Why study Chinese Shanghai nightlife? We might begin with the question of why Shanghai and Chinese nightlife has been studied so little in the past. One reason might be that in Shanghai and China, as well in many other societies, nightlife is not seen as serious. Indeed, in everyday discourse, nightlife is dismissed as "play" as opposed to the serious business of everyday life--issues such as work and family that also constitute the serious business of social science. In anthropologist Victor Turner's terminology, nightlife is a region of "liminoid" activity, counterpoised to the daylight worlds of work and family.

The idea of play as opposed to workaday life is captured by the word wan in Mandarin, a term used by many Chinese to describe going out at night, as well as the social and sexual relations undertaken by people in Shanghai and Chinese nightlife spaces. As elsewhere, Shanghai nightlife is a space in which people form temporary social ties that they may not even acknowledge in daytime, and where people engage in illicit or subterranean forms of play they usually hide from daylight eyes. These nightlife include dancing, flirting, provocative dressing, drunkenness and drug taking, temporary sexual alliances and prostitution. By studying Shanghai nightlife we find forms of sociability that are not seen by day or explainable simply by referring to daytime structures. For example, my research on dance and nightclubs in Shanghai in the 1990s points out how people used the space of the dancehall and dance itself to explore and express sexual themes that were off-limits in other social spaces. In other words, nightlife "play" can be productive in terms of new social relations and cultural expressions, partly related to global flows of ideas and people. (2) It may also be disruptive to social boundaries and hierarchies.

Much of the research on rock music culture in China points to its rebellious messages and the disruptive nature of rock performance and audience participation that create spaces for alternative expressions of identity, including political aspirations.' In this issue, Komlosy's account of rock music in 1990s Yunnan describes the creative and disruptive qualities of nightlife cultural production that can at times blur social boundaries, such as those between national and ethnic minority.

Conversely, it is possible that by accepting the "alibi" of Shanghai nightlife as trivial we are missing the role of nightlife in reproducing larger social relationships of power and inequality. Anne Allison's ethnography of hostess clubs in Japan describes an ideological construction of sexual "play" (asobi) in which men use women hostesses as commercial props in masculine rituals of sexual banter and flirtation ostensibly located outside the workday world, but ultimately serving to reinforce men's ties to companies and the gendering of corporate work and family life. In this issue, both Tamara Perkins' study of a rural dance hall hostess and Zheng's ethnography of a hostess club illustrate the ways in which "play" can reinforce forms of social inequality.

The second common dimension that runs through these ethnographies of Shanghai and Chinese nightlife, therefore, is issues of power and social inequality. As recent studies have shown, consumption, including leisure consumption, is a central means for expressing both social solidarity and social power in China. Nightlife in contemporary Shanghai and China is associated with spending money--sometimes large amounts--in ways that build ties but also establish status. Even so, as Zheng and Perkins' articles in this issue well illustrate, nightlife spaces provide opportunities for subaltern figures, such as migrant women, to improve their social and cultural status through relatively high earnings as well as provide exposure to foreign people and urban and transnational culture. Nightlife therefore features a paradoxical mixture of both subordination (as performed within the space of the club) and social mobility for hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who occupy these jobs.

The tension between what Georg Simmel calls the "democratic ethos" of play and the inequality that actually characterizes nightlife spaces in China is also a tension that runs through these ethnographic narratives. Indeed it is also a tension reflected in the subjective perspectives of the researchers themselves. Some were obviously more in a position to have fun in the field than others. The gendering of customer roles in hostess clubs, for example, almost certainly excluded women researchers from full participation in the enjoyment of male-oriented sexualized play. For example, Zheng was exposed to some of the same forms of harassment that female hostesses were also exposed to. Their status as Caucasian "foreigners" may have given Field and Komlosy more ability to distance themselves from, and also to have enjoyed the nightlife spaces that they investigated. In studying nightlife, it is necessary to modulate perspectives to account both for the fun, pleasure and play that enliven these spaces as well as the structures of inequality that create positions of power within the social space. (7) Studies of nightlife generally, and studies of Chinese society both benefit from these perspectives. Shanghai nightclubs guide, Shanghai massage parlors, china model girls, bars nightlife.

Shanghai nightlife shows itself to be a particularly fruitful space in which to account for how people use elements of "play"--sociability, music, dance and sensuality--to both build and contest power relations. These studies of nightlife in China point out that the western perception of nightlife as a site of rebellion and anti-structure might need to be modified to account for the ways in which nightlife can reproduce forms of inequality. On the other hand, western accounts of nightlife point out that studies of Chinese consumer society need to take into account the forms of subversive play and creative rebellion that individuals engage in within larger structures of power and inequality.

Commercial Chinese and Shanghai nightlife of the type discussed here was banned by the Communist authorities during the 1950s, and practices such as partnered dancing were deemed to be forms of bourgeois decadence. Nightlife thus recommenced anew in the 1980s though not ad novum. All the forms of Shanghai and Chinese nightlife discussed in this issue have their roots in transnational flows of cultural forms as well as in China's earlier development of nightlife in the Republican era. It is not possible to discuss all of these transnational ties and historical legacies here, but it is important to trace the forms and backgrounds of some of the more popular forms of nightlife in contemporary China.

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